People's Voice

01 Sep 2024 - NYC

How might a population speak as one voice? This project explores this question by taking a multiplicity of comments from varioius sources and uses AI to generate a single voice that represents them.

It does so by taking a heirarchical approach to the problem. First, it takes individual comments and uses Claude (an AI model) to summarize them. Then it takes these summaries and recursively summarizes them again. This creates a heirarchy of summaries, with the final summary representing the whole polity.

The results are then visualized using d3.js in a heirarchical tree, where each intermediatenode contains a summary and the leaves contain comments.

In general, I found the summaries to contain the essence of the original comments, but with a slight shift in perspective often due to some embellishment by the AI. I thought it was an interesting proof of concept, and a fun way to visualize how a single voice can be created from a multitude of perspectives. I hope to make it available as an online tool in the future.

Visualization of the hierarchical summarization process.