When government officials craft policies, there is often a comment period for public feedback. Lawmakers have long had to sort through fake feedback that is mass-produced in an effort to sway policy, but they’ve generally gotten used to detecting it. With, artificial intelligence, however, people can submit realistic-seeming comments, which are harder to dismiss as being fabrications with no person behind them. That’s just one way AI can be used to generate text and statements, in civic conversations, for which no one can be found to be answerable.

This issue, among others, has caught the attention of Deb Roy, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). In a new essay published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, titled, “Who stands behind the words?,” Roy calls for a renewed emphasis on responsibility in communication, asserting that even when AI is used to craft text, there needs to be accountability and “answerability.”

Building better group dialogues to produce more public trust is a core part of the work of CCC. The group, along with Cortico, the closely affiliated nonprofit Roy co-founded, has helped facilitate group discussions on important issues in many situations — including civic meetings, schools, deliberative assemblies, and private organizations — and used tech tools, including AI, to help find themes among comments, and more. But the center also designs this process so that participants can check and override the tech-based output at each key step. Ultimately, a person is responsible for every public comment.

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