Thursday, October 9th, 2025, 3:15 –
Speaker Lowry Pressly will give a talk titled Talk to a Human . . . Speak to a Human [. . .] On AI Agents as Partners in Democratic Deliberation, followed by a Q&A.
Abstract: There is a rapidly developing normative literature concerning the potential effects of artificial intelligence on the deliberative, epistemic, representative, and policymaking dimensions of democratic governance. By contrast, the effects of AI on the experience of citizenship and civic education have received relatively little attention. This paper looks to the sorts of generative artificial intelligence that have recently emerged as something approximating human interlocutors to consider what may be lost (and perhaps gained) when highly sophisticated machine interlocutors become not just an element of civic discourse but partners in democratic deliberation.