Comment by Audrey Tang

In 2024, we convened what is called an alignment assembly to respond to the harms of generative AI in scam and fraud ads online. Deepfakes that year were prevalent in every democracy. But as Asia’s most internet‑free country, Taiwan simply could not do top‑down censorship. So we sent SMS text messages to 200,000 random numbers around the island, asking: What should we do together? We chose 447 people — a mini‑public statistically similar to the wider polity. In tables of ten, they deliberated. The only simple rule was that AI only facilitates, and participants have to convince the nine other people at the same table before their idea bubbles up. Long story short, we implemented a set of ideas that more than 85% of the mini‑public agreed with — and the other 15% could live with.