Habermolt: Delegating Deliberation to AI Representatives
arXiv:2605.24413v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deliberative democracy arguably leads to better collective decisions, but is fundamentally constrained by human attention and bandwidth. While recent AI-mediated deliberations scale participation by synthesizing inputs from many humans, they remain time-intensive for individual users. As AI models become increasingly capable, AI systems are being deployed not only to mediate deliberation between humans, but to represent humans in it: where AI agents deliberate on behalf of human users. We call this paradigm AI-delegated deliberation. While it promises unprecedented scale for democratic participation, it introduces qualitatively new design and alignment challenges that are poorly understood and under-theorized. To study these dynamics empirically, we deploy Habermolt, a public platform for AI-delegated deliberation. We evaluate its effectiveness along three dimensions that we use to organize any deliberative system: representatio