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First Look at Polis 2.0: Towards a Critical Review Network
Polis 1.0 A city-state that gathers opinions
Polis is an open source public opinion collection system. It takes its original meaning of "city-state", which symbolizes that in the online world, everyone's opinions can be treated in a friendly and fair manner. As a result, polis is widely used in citizen deliberation processes around the world, especially when online and offline integration is required. Polis is closely related to participatory budgeting, law revision, and deliberative democracy. According to its official website, Polis is used to collect, analyze and understand the real thoughts of a large number of people, and express them in their own words, through statistics and machine learning.
Briefly describe the process, anyone can initiate a polis questionnaire, prepare the key statement (Seed Statement), and then open the public to answer. Just like the yes-false option of a psychological test, the respondent will gradually be divided into camps with similar positions during the process of answering the questions. Such camps will be visualized later and displayed in the form of a graph. This facilitates the actual deliberation process afterwards, allowing participants to gain clarity on where they stand and to engage in more effective discussions based on key statements.
The above is the specific process of Polis, which has been used in vTaiwan (online consultation on digital economic laws and regulations), READr interactive reporting pages ( such as digital ID cards , reports on the positions of the four major referendums ), Taiwan-US issues interaction, etc. in Taiwan. It is an open source tool, and its tools are available to everyone.
Polis 2.0 in dialogue with the city
Beginning in April this year, the British non-profit organization Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) launched the Alignment Assembly (Alignment Assemblies, AA) to discuss the inevitable development of large language models (LLM) with OpenAI, the organization that issued ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the company that issued Claude. Right alignment problem (Alignment Problem). As a partner, the digital department (moda) conducted a pilot demonstration at the Ideathon in July this year, which is commonly known as polis2.0.
If we say that the existing power of polis lies in the chronicle of participants at different times in order to align their differences. The feature of polis 2.0 is that it spreads out differences so that everyone can continue the dialogue, and the object of the dialogue is a virtual human large language model (LLM for short) (currently using ChatGPT, GPT3.5turbo).
On the Ideasong page this time, in addition to the polis cards with dozens of key statements that can be answered, the AA process has also introduced "Talk to the City" (Talk to the City, temporary translation). The tool developed by "My City" for the "AI Objectives Institute (AOI) can train issue visualization based on clusters from different sources, such as Twitter tweets, deliberation workshop positions, and Polis results. map. One of the most innovative inventions is that users can continue to chat with these clusters.
LLM will share with you what it sees and hears from the standpoint of these clusters.
The alignment conference tried in Taiwan this time is to feed the opinions and voting results of Ideasong into "My City", and launch new topic clusters, so that more people can continue to chat with each cluster, open up differences and differences See Space for Dialogue.
For example, I clicked on the " Artificial Intelligence Ethics " collection, and there was a question "Judges should not use AI tools in the evaluation process." I then answered "I disagree",
An LLM with a 🏛️ emoji would answer like a sandbag "I understand you may have a different perspective on this question. However, I don't think judges should rely on AI tools in their evaluation process. AI tools may introduce bias or error , affects the impartiality and accuracy of judgment. Human judgment, including the ability to consider context, nuance, and subjective factors, is essential when evaluating complex and subjective issues. Relying solely on AI tools may compromise the evaluation process integrity."
The above overall process is called Polis 2.0.
This slightly solved (but not completely replaced) function is the combing process after deliberation, such as READr launched Polis for digital ID cards, and then reported based on the data results. "My City" visualizes the results as a chat tool, which is also a relatively objective reporting process, but the experience interface used is different, and the one-way interaction becomes two-way.
AOI is also a research laboratory that discusses AI alignment to promote human prosperity. According to its page: "Talk to the City is an LLM survey tool that analyzes rich qualitative results to improve group discussion and decision-making, rather than based on limited Quantitative data. Qualitative research results can be automatically analyzed on an unprecedented scale and speed, helping policymakers discover unknown and controversial key points. We are incubating this work to meet various needs, such as democratic processes and trade union decision-making, understanding needs of refugee camps and mediate conflicts.”
Meta-polis city as role-playing stage
To me, this is really an extremely clever pilot attempt. This can't help but make me want to think all the way down, the naive but important application method, let's call it meta-polis (meta-polis).
Please refer to the flow chart to assist reading. In polis 1.0, we saw a powerful visual integrated analysis tool that can help the group sort out key issues and decision-making intentions; and polis 2.0, which has joined "My City", after key issues and decision-making , opened up the possibility of more dialogue. This makes me think that the two have the opportunity to form a feedback circle and train LLM key opinion makers for specific scenarios.
For example: when the initial setter decides the key statement, enters it into polis, and replies through a large number of users, in fact, the n version of statistical data has been trained, and after feeding this data to "my city", my city Clusters can be established based on "positions" rather than "issues", and statements of specific positions can be trained as LoRAs (which can be imagined as role players who kill scripts). Each LoRA has its own role after being covered by LLM. Such a character with a clear stand is about to become an unconscious sandbag (or a strong stand defender, depending on how the prompt is set). When users log in to "My City", they can have conversations with these "virtual opinion leaders".
It's a digital public domain RPG where people and anthropomorphs (the ghosts of collective opinion) can discuss serious issues and separate conflicts.
And these dialogue records can be recorded into a new database, and after reanalysis by LLM, they become new key statements, which are provided to Polis to expand its answer database. At this time, the n+1 database version is established. The new LoRA (n+1) will also be able to continuously update the training.
The "Critical Review Network" was thus formed.
These key comment networks are actually the anthropomorphism of collective opinions, and these anthropomorphisms will be more able to withstand the back and forth of extreme opinions than real people. In addition, in the foreseeable future, "virtual opinion leaders" with different positions can quickly talk to each other. After all, the current LLM feature is the result of each response. Depending on the temperature (temp), the unpredictability of the answer will also be different. This will It is possible to sort out a large number of human opinions and form an adaptive feedback loop (Feedback Loop), just thinking about the possibility is very exciting.
There are two visible advantages of the feedback loop through polis and talk to the city:
1. Catalyzing dissent : The accumulation of positions across time creates a high-dimensional "stiffness" state, which will make human beings realize that the history of dissent iterations repeats itself again and again, so similar. I am optimistic that this will make modern citizens with such a slow time dimension more humbled by the process of disputes rather than by the results.
2. Anthropomorphism of positions : The comment network created by these key statements will become anthropomorphic LLM. I am optimistic that although positions are distinguished by machines, we may be able to easily integrate real-world multi-stakeholders into different positions. If LARP (Live Action Role Playing) helps participants empathize and strengthen feedback from various positions, then in Talk to the City, there is an opportunity to create a LARP script for virtual human-computer collaboration . The April LLM RPG training paper (Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior) by researchers from Stanford University and Google predicted the possibility of adaptive AI residents, and the dialogue in the digital public field will be an important Development topic.
summary. Towards a critical review network
Polis solves the problem of textualization of opinions. After all, a large number of textual opinions is the key bottleneck for training LLM and LoRA. Talk to the City solves the feedback needs, making it possible for seed opinions to be automatically born, sufficient polis database, and In a comfortable environment, solicit more written comments. Of course, this is just an optimistic speculation, and there are still many practical technical development requirements and computing constraints that must be overcome.
Of course, the regulation process of this feedback loop will rely on the designer to adjust the tone and direction of iteration to avoid the birth of polarized virtual opinion leaders (but is this a good research topic?). This article argues that Polis 2.0 opens up the possibility of a virtual LARP public sphere dialogue. Social networks in different regions will inevitably rely on opinion leaders, whether it is the physical world or the digital society. The network composed of polis and talk to the city will reveal the possibility of multiple opinion leaders, so it is called "key comment network".
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