Accountable Human-AI Deliberation with LLMs: Scaling Collective Intelligence through Symbiotic Scaffolding

Wajdi Zaghouani


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can support democratic deliberation at scales previously constrained by turn-taking and facilitation bandwidth. Recent work shows that LLM-generated group statements are often preferred over human-mediated outputs, while theoretical analyses argue that LLMs relax the simultaneity constraints limiting collective intelligence. Yet pure LLM mediation risks collapsing pluralism, over-optimizing for agreement, and undermining legitimacy when participants cannot contest how they are represented. We propose a symbiotic human-AI framework organized into three layers: observation and diversity amplification, facilitation with clause-level provenance, and human primacy for ratification. Our contributions include graded coverage, diversity, and erasure metrics with salience-aware weighting; a provenance pipeline combining cross-encoder similarity with causal knockout diagnostics; preference-conditioned trade-off control; equity-aware contestability workflows; adversarial robustness tests; and an evaluation protocol with ablation designs informed by evidence of LLM-as-judge limitations. The result is a testable blueprint for deliberation technology that scales collective intelligence while preserving agency and legitimacy.
Anthology ID:
2026.delite-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of The 2nd Workshop on Language-driven Deliberation Technology
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Lucas Anastasiou, Katarina Boland, Anna De Liddo, Neele Falk, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Gabriella Lapesa, Julia Romberg
Venues:
DELITE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7–17
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-delite-02
DOI:
10.63317/37crtjgcefv3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wajdi Zaghouani. 2026. Accountable Human-AI Deliberation with LLMs: Scaling Collective Intelligence through Symbiotic Scaffolding. In Proceedings of The 2nd Workshop on Language-driven Deliberation Technology, pages 7–17, Mallorca, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Accountable Human-AI Deliberation with LLMs: Scaling Collective Intelligence through Symbiotic Scaffolding (Zaghouani, DELITE 2026)
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