Frankly, the video-based civic discourse platform from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society’s Applied Social Media Lab (ASML), is at the center of a new initiative that has been awarded a grant aimed at exploring how AI can improve how we engage in dialogue and make decisions at scale.
The “Moonshot” seed grant from the Laude Institute, a nonprofit research organization supporting work at the intersection of academia and industry, is a new initiative that “[asks] today’s most consequential AI researchers…if you had the resources, how would you use AI to solve humanity’s hardest problems?”
The team, led in part by Frankly Principal Investigator Lawrence Lessig and including professors from across Harvard and MIT, has been awarded $250,000 to explore how AI can be used to improve the scale and reach of Frankly’s online deliberation capabilities. “Democracy has always struggled with the reality that meaningful deliberation does not scale,” the team writes. “This project aims to change that, building on an existing open-source video deliberation platform to enable millions of people to participate in structured, meaningful civic conversations simultaneously.”
“Frankly is a flagship project of ASML and we could not be more excited for it and the team to be a part of this incredibly important work,” said ASML Senior Director Meg Marco. “As a lab, we are motivated to explore the potential for responsibly deployed artificial intelligence to improve the quality of deliberative discourse, not just within the Frankly platform, but across all aspects of society.”
Lessig’s team is one of 8 from some of North America’s leading universities that have been awarded this inaugural grant, selected from a pool of 125 total applicants, according to Laude.
The Berkman Klein Center’s Applied Social Media Lab and its projects, including Frankly, are generously funded by Frank McCourt and the 501(c)(3) non-profit Project Liberty.