He was surrounded by seven staff from the world’s leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. He wanted Megill’s help.

For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill’s view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

Polis, launched in 2012, was Megill’s solution. The system worked by allowing users to articulate their views in short statements, and letting them vote on others. Using machine learning, the system could produce detailed maps of users’ values, clearly identifying clusters of people with similar beliefs. But the real innovation was simpler: with this data, Polis could surface statements that even groups who usually disagreed could agree upon. In other words, it cut through polarization and offered a path forward. The Taiwanese government saw enough promise in Polis to integrate it into its political process, and Twitter tapped a version of the technology to power its Community Notes fact-checking feature. Now OpenAI had come knocking.

Teams of computer scientists at OpenAI were trying to address the technical problem of how to align their AIs to human values. But strategy and policy-focused staff inside the company were also grappling with the thorny corollaries: exactly whose values should AI reflect? And who should get to decide?

OpenAI’s leaders were loath to make those decisions unilaterally. They had seen the political quagmire that social media companies became stuck in during the 2010s, when a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires set the rules of public discourse for billions. And yet they were also uneasy about handing power over their AIs to governments or regulators alone. Instead, the AI lab was searching for a third way: going directly to the people. Megill’s work was the closest thing it had found to a blueprint.

Zaremba had an enticing proposal for Megill. Both men knew that Polis’s technology was effective but labor-intensive; it required humans to facilitate the deliberations that happened on the platform and analyze the data afterwards. It was complicated, slow, and expensive—factors Megill suspected were limiting its uptake in democracies around the world. Large language models (LLMs)—the powerful AI systems that underpin tools like ChatGPT—could help overcome those bottlenecks, Zaremba told him. Chatbots seemed uniquely suited to the task of discussing complex topics with people, asking follow-up questions, and identifying areas of consensus.

Eleven days after their meeting, Zaremba sent Megill a video of a working prototype in action. “That’s sci-fi,” Megill thought to himself excitedly. Then he accepted Zaremba’s invitation to advise OpenAI on one of its most ambitious AI governance projects to date. The company wanted to find out whether deliberative technologies, like Polis, could provide a path toward AI alignment upon which large swaths of the public could agree. In return, Megill might learn whether LLMs were the missing puzzle piece he was looking for to help Polis finally overcome the flaws he saw in democracy.

On May 25, OpenAI announced on its blog that it was seeking applications for a $1 million program called “Democratic Inputs to AI.” Ten teams would each receive $100,000 to develop “proof-of-concepts for a democratic process that could answer questions about what rules AI systems should follow.” There is currently no coherent mechanism for accurately taking the global public’s temperature on anything, let alone a matter as complex as the behavior of AI systems. OpenAI was trying to find one. “We’re really trying to think about: what are actually the most viable mechanisms for giving the broadest number of people some say in how these systems behave?” OpenAI’s head of global affairs Anna Makanju told TIME in November. “Because even regulation is going to fall, obviously, short of that.”

Megill would sit on an unpaid committee of three experts who would advise OpenAI on which applications to fund. (The findings from the experiments would not be binding, “at least for now,” the company wrote.) As an example of the kind of research projects it was looking for, OpenAI published a mockup of a supercharged version of Polis, where ChatGPT would facilitate a deliberation at scale, canvassing people’s views and identifying areas of consensus. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was clearly enthused by the potential of this idea. “We have a new ability to do mass-scale direct democracy that we’ve never had before,” he told TIME in an interview in November. “AI can just chat with everybody and get their actual preferences.”

But before OpenAI could publicly announce the results of its grant program, the company was thrown into chaos. The board of the nonprofit that governs OpenAI fired Altman, alleging he had been dishonest with them. After a tumultuous five days Altman was back at the helm with a mostly-new board in place. Suddenly, the questions of AI governance that the recipients of OpenAI’s $100,000 grants were trying to answer no longer seemed so theoretical. Control over advanced AI was now clearly a matter of hard political and economic power—one where OpenAI and its patron, Microsoft, appeared unlikely to relinquish much, if any, significant leverage. A cutthroat competition was brewing between Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon for dominance over AI. The tech companies had begun competing to build “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical system that could match or even surpass human capabilities, delivering trillions of dollars in the process. In this climate, was OpenAI seriously about to let the public decide the rules that governed its most powerful systems? And with so much at stake, would it ever truly be possible to democratize AI?

Read the full story.

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— A Roman scroll, partially preserved when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and deciphered using artificial intelligence, reports TIME’s Will Henshall.

— The Federal Communications Commission banned robocalls that contain voices generated by artificial intelligence, after a robocall featuring the faked voice of President Joe Biden urging voters in New Hampshire not to cast their ballots in the New Hampshire Democratic primary sparked alarm.

— OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is in talks with investors to raise up to $7 trillion for an ambitious initiative that would reshape the global semiconductor chip industry, reports The Wall Street Journal.

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