Public debate about AI’s impact on culture and the creative industry tends to be polarised and siloed, making it difficult to build the cross-cutting consensus that durable policy requires. Deliberative minipublics bring together a diverse cross-section of citizens for structured dialogue and offer one promising way through this impasse.

Citizens ReAssembled is a deliberative experiment in which a panel of citizens, deliberately assembled across a spectrum of views, work through four workshop sessions to develop concrete policy proposals on AI and the creative industry. Our research independently evaluates the process through observation, pre- and post-deliberation surveys, and focus groups and interviews with participants, non-participants, and policymakers — including a “shareback” experiment testing how different modes of communicating deliberative outputs affect broader public opinion.

The findings aim to advance understanding of when and how citizen deliberation can contribute to more legitimate governance of transformative technologies.

This project is supported by the Future-Ready Society Impact Fund, a joint initiative of the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and the Institute of Policy Studies at the National University of Singapore, with Tote Board as a contributing partner.

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash