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Generative Social Choice

delete2026-04-01
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PRE
AI
S
Sara Fish
G
Golz, Paul *
D
David Parkes
P
Procaccia, Ariel
G
Gili Rusak
I
Itai Shapira
M
M Wuthrich
DOI:10.1145/3799709delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We introduce generative social choice, a design methodology for open-ended democratic processes that combines the rigor of social choice theory with the capability of large language models to generate text and extrapolate preferences. Our framework divides the design of AI-augmented democratic processes into two components: first, proving that the process satisfies representation guarantees when given access to oracle queries; second, empirically validating that these queries can be approximately implemented using a large language model. We apply this framework to the problem of summarizing free-form opinions into a proportionally representative set of opinion statements; specifically, we develop a democratic process with representation guarantees and use this process to portray the opinions of participants in a survey about abortion policy. In a trial with 100 representative US residents, we find that 84 out of 100 participants feel excellently or exceptionally represented by the set of five statements we extracted.
Keywords:
Computational social choice
large language models
proportional representation

Journal

J
Journal of the ACM
IF:
2.5
Papers:
20
Citations:
0

Organization

H
Harvard University
Scholars:
26.3W
Papers: 21.9W
Citations: 28.7W
C
cornell university
Scholars:
4.3K
Papers: 1.8K
Citations: 0