What does it mean for AI to be democratic?

What does it mean for AI to be democratic?

Some pushback on a specific fuzzy idea with some ominous implications

Andy Masley

Jun 21, 2026

I love democracy. I have what’s basically religious zealotry for the form of liberal democracy most of the wealthy world lives under. Citizens having control and oversight of their leaders is a rare treasure in human history, and one that AI threatens to erode. I have never read a popular modern critic of democracy in the broad sense who I didn’t see as, at best, a complete joke.

I’ve noticed that in lots of conversations about current AI models and the general AI buildout, it’s becoming more and more popular to say that AI isn’t happening "in a democratic way. There are times when I strongly agree. I’m very worried about the ways AI could enable the concentration of power, or impose huge (including existential) risks that citizens never signed up for and would hit the brakes on if they could.

But there’s a specific way of arguing that AI isn’t “democratic” that’s gaining traction, and that I find ominous and antithetical to what makes a good democratic society. It’s usually dressed in the language of progressive politics, but underneath, I think it carries authoritarian, homogenizing and anti-democratic implications.

Pluralist vs homogenizing democracy

There are two visions of democracy hiding behind our talk about it, one I think is good and the other I think is bad, and you can probably tell which is which by the labels I give them.

The goal of pluralist democracy is to give people with wildly different beliefs about the good life and what’s really valuable control and veto points over how they’re governed, without letting them steamroll each other into all living under one contentious ethical or religious vision of the world.

Most liberal democracies like the US manage to balance pluralism with majority rule. Despite being a majority Christian country, and that majority having voting power over who represents them, the US government is not able to impose Christianity on everyone else. People have a lot of democratic control over contentious issues of government, but they often can’t use this to steamroll other people into very specific visions of the good life. Christians are restrained by governing norms from forcing non-Christians from attending church.

The goal of homogenizing democracy is to discover the true, good ethical values and beliefs about the world, with the faith that the majority either publicly or secretly believes them, and then to structure all society around those true, good ethical beliefs, and push ideological minorities into going along.

Here’s a more ominous way to frame it: “There is an authentic community of rooted, powerless, good people, who know what’s good and right in life and agree on it. They’re up against unrooted powerful people who don’t know what’s good in life and want to override it for their own gain. The good people are in the majority. Democracy means discovering these good values all good people hold, and then representing and acting on it, steamrolling the bad powerful people into going along with these good values.”

I read this as ominous because it’s an especially useful cudgel for forcing people into your specific vision of ethics and the good life. If you invalidate another value system by saying it’s not what all the good, powerless people believe, this gives you more permission to steamroll the people who hold that value system in the name of resisting power. Many Christian nationalists will frame themselves as representing the good, simple, rooted majority beset by powerful cabals who don’t understand their values, and use this to argue that underneath these differences is only a raw struggle for power that the good people need to win. Thus to them, seizing the government to impose Christianity on religious minorities is actually a form of democracy. It’s simply letting the values of the good majority be represented in how the country is governed. Stuff like this is why I worry about accepting a narrative that lets homogenizing democracy sneak in unexamined. Democracy at its best weighs the pluralistic desires of radically different people. At its worst it excludes those desires from the debate entirely, on the grounds that anyone who disagrees with the majority is illegitimate and not worth making concessions for.

And it can creep in under the guise of noble-sounding rules, like “a town should have control over how its resources are used.” For example, consider the claim that a small town should have complete democratic control over what gets built there. This sounds nice in the abstract, but is actually a way for homogenizing democracy to slip in. Imagine what happens if 80% of the town is Catholic, and 10% is Muslim. The Muslim population gets together and says they would like to buy some of the town’s land to build a mosque. Will this mosque get built if it’s voted on by the town? Well, 80% of the town believes that the mosque is part of a false religion that sends people to hell. It seems unlikely that the mosque will get built. By giving citizens democratic control over everything that gets built in their town, we’ve allowed them to steamroll pluralist values and homogenize the area into the contentious beliefs of the majority of people who happen to live there. This is bad!

Some people imply that in a “truly” democratic society, all value disagreement would ultimately be dissolved through deliberation. Communities would come together and deliberate until they discovered the most virtuous or liberatory way to live. I think deliberation like this is a great model for specific decisions the government makes, but it shouldn’t be allowed to seep as far into everyday life, because taken to the extreme it implies everyone must eventually be made to agree on every contentious value.

So while I think that at its best, liberal democracy is the transcendent crowning achievement of human history, talk about democracy can also be used to justify authoritarian homogenizing impulses and needs to be carefully examined. When people invoke democracy, they’re usually smuggling in general rules about how society should be governed, and those rules’ political implications need to be drawn out. The specific model of democracy where the goal is always to discover the good values that need to be imposed on everyone, that all good people either publicly or secretly believe (or would believe if they could be led to the light), and that anyone who disagrees with is not worth considering in deliberation, is a recipe for destroying the delicate balance that allows people with wildly different beliefs to live together and change their values freely.

People in democratic societies have strong reasons to try to frame their opponents’ opinions as outside the sphere of legitimate democratic consideration. An effective way to do this is to frame their opponents as representing “the opinions of the powerful”meaning illegitimate, out-of-touch views trying to undermine the good people. This is often a way of trying to banish different views from the process of democratic deliberation. I’m worried that this framing comes up a lot in the AI debate, used by people who think they’re behaving as the defenders of democracy, but are often actually stifling authentic difficult democratic deliberation between radically different values.

Which visions of democratic AI are pluralist vs homogenizing?

I think AI poses a unique technological threat to pluralist democracy. Society currently exists in a delicate, kind of miraculous balance where most people are able to add a lot of economic value, and have lots of ways to defect from important systems if their political power is threatened. We are deeply interdependent. AI could, under some models, erode our economic interdependence and leave powerful people with less incentive to respect the will of everyday voters. It’s very possible that democracy is a lucky passing phase in human history, built around a specific economic regime that’s existed since the Industrial Revolution that might go away if we enter a new and different mode of economic production. See here for more.

AI also poses lots of other risks, either indirect risks that people will use it to create dangerous powerful new weapons, or more speculative direct risks of AI itself overriding what we want. Just like I think everyday people should have democratic control over whether their neighbors have access to nuclear weapons, I think people have a democratic right to expect the general flow of technological progress to not descend into a specific basin where society enters an incredibly unstable equilibrium of extremely powerful easily accessible weapons.

The dynamics of automation with AI also threaten to concentrate wealth and power in the labs themselves. OpenAI and Anthropic are now some of the fastest growing companies in history. Many of their members have become billionaires, and some local political fights are becoming proxy battles between them over rival visions of AI safety and governance policy. If you expect AI capabilities to continue to progress, this poses a danger of a unique form of corporate power consolidation we haven’t seen in America in a long time, if ever. This also threatens political pluralism, and people have a right to expect that their representatives respond to this new threat. How? I don’t really know, but I’m willing to entertain lots of different answers from libertarians or socialists or anyone in between. I worry our learned political impulses might be as useful in the new era of AI as Aristotle would have been in the Industrial Revolution.

Lots of concerns like this I think are legitimate threats to pluralist democracy, and people have the right to democratically demand forms of intervention that I wouldn’t normally consider for more normal technology. More broadly, a new era of intense automation will demand democratic deliberation between people with radically different values on the shape of the new world that they want to live in together.

I think AI will over the next ten years demand an “all hands on deck” response from political philosophers, economists, and everyday people, and authentic pluralist democratic deliberation needs to happen.

While I’ve been happy with some aspects of how the left’s thinking has evolved on this, there are specific strands of intensely anti-democratic thinking that seem to be attempting to take over the debate and define what democratic AI even means. Here I worry a lot that people are using the language of democracy to push for homogenization and authoritarianism.

A clear example comes up a lot in the data center buildout. A very common line among people claiming to represent democracy in the debate is to say “No one is asking for these! They only benefit billionaires!” I think if I were able to separate these people from the debate, take them out for some nice tea somewhere, have a long conversation with them about something else, and then politely ask “Just being real, do you think there are a decent number of everyday people who think about AI in a different way than you whose demand for more is incentivizing the data center buildout?” I think they would say yes, but that these people are mistaken. We could go on and have a nice conversation from there. I worry that the initial claim that “no one is asking for this!” is basically a way of pushing the vast numbers of people who are in fact asking for this out of the difficult process of deliberation that should happen with any new technology.

There are a lot of people who want to use AI. Chatbots are consistently the most downloaded apps. Half of all web developers polled say they use AI daily. About a quarter of Americans say they use chatbots daily.

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More people say AI helps than hurts most things they use it for.

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