Evidence for Democracy, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to evidence-informed public policy, is convening a virtual panel discussion examining what it will actually take to build public trust in artificial intelligence systems. The event responds directly to Canada's newly announced national AI strategy, which links the country's slow AI adoption to low public trust and limited AI literacy, an assumption the panel intends to challenge. Bringing together experts in AI safety, digital media literacy, science and technology policy, and democratic engagement, the discussion will explore how governance structures, technical reliability, and meaningful public participation shape whether communities trust the AI systems increasingly embedded in their daily lives. For NCDD's network, the event offers a timely case study in the intersection of technology governance and democratic legitimacy, and a reminder that literacy campaigns alone cannot substitute for accountable public engagement. The panel will also consider how AI's risks and benefits are distributed unevenly across different communities, a question central to equity-minded civic practice. The session takes place online on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, from 12 to 1 pm EST, and is open to academics, policymakers, advocacy groups, and members of the public. Read more in the blog post below.

Roshan Bliss, Director of Democracy Innovations at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD), discusses his most ambitious project yet in a recent episode of the Derate The Hate podcast: A House Divided, a reality television concept that places three groups representing left, right, and center cultural outlooks in a house together for seven days to work through a real community conflict under professional facilitation. Bliss frames the project around what he calls many-to-many conflict, arguing that most of the country's deepest disagreements involve entire communities rather than two individuals, and require structured, multi-stakeholder deliberation rather than debate or shouting. He describes plans to pair the show with AI-powered deliberative technology that lets a large viewing audience weigh in continuously on the unfolding conflict, extending the reach of dialogue and deliberation practice well beyond people who would normally seek it out. The project, now in active development with a sizzle reel underway and funding conversations with social-impact incubators, reflects NCDD's broader push to bring democratic deliberation into cultural spaces the field has historically struggled to reach.

​DemocracyNext, the democratic innovation nonprofit led by founder Claudia Chwalisz, has released Deliberative Muscles & AI, a paper examining how deliberation technology can strengthen rather than erode citizens' capacities to deliberate. Written by Chwalisz, Sammy McKinney, Jorim Theuns, and Eugene Yi, the paper reframes deliberative assemblies not as recommendation-producing machines but as spaces where people build the cognitive, relational, and dispositional capacities democratic life depends on. Its central argument is that whether AI helps or harms deliberation is a matter of design, and it offers a typology of seven "deliberative muscles" alongside a practical framework for judging whether a given tool strengthens or substitutes for each one. For the dialogue and deliberation field, the paper is a rigorous guide for practitioners, funders, and technologists weighing how to bring AI into participatory work without hollowing out its human core.

​The OECD's Public Governance Directorate, in collaboration with the Bertelsmann Stiftung, has released Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Citizen Participation, a report examining how AI tools can support and strengthen participatory and deliberative processes. Drawing on 50 real-world use cases across 22 countries, the report offers a typology of nine AI applications, from sense-making and translation to facilitation and moderation, that help governments and practitioners navigate an emerging and fast-moving field. It pairs this practical framework with a clear-eyed analysis of the risks, including exclusion, loss of nuance, and overreliance, and it insists throughout that AI should support rather than replace skilled facilitators and genuine citizen engagement. For the dialogue and deliberation community, the report is a timely resource for thinking rigorously about where technology can deepen participation and where human judgment must remain at the center of democratic practice.

In "Realizing the Potential Gains of AI-Enabled Deliberative Democracy," Micah Weinberg, Nonresident Scholar at Carnegie California, argues that the main obstacle to AI-supported public deliberation is not technology but the weakness of the democratic institutions meant to govern it. His central claim reframes a familiar problem: the tools to run large-scale, accessible, evidence-based deliberation already exist, while the staffing, procurement rules, audit capacity, and standards needed to deploy them responsibly do not. Weinberg identifies concrete gains AI could deliver, including deliberation at the scale of tens of thousands without losing depth, reduced informational asymmetries among participants, wider inclusion, and stronger accountability between citizen input and policy outcomes, alongside the risks that threaten each. For practitioners, the piece offers a governance-first agenda, including certification standards, participant-facing audit mechanisms, and publicly governed open-source platforms, rather than a technical wish list. Its framing speaks directly to NCDD's mission by insisting that the legitimacy of deliberation depends on human and institutional choices, not on the sophistication of the tools.