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Using AI to Support Discursive Integration in Online Discussions

Online discussions can be rough, especially when it comes to political issues. They are often characterized by a harsh tone which discourages many people from participating in them at all. At the same time, these discussions are very important for democracy as they promote exchange and help individuals form their own opinions. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be detrimental to the quality of discussions (e.g. when used in spam bots), it also offers a promising opportunity to support constructive and inclusive discussions, for example by making them more civil. To strengthen such discursive integration we have engaged in a co-creation process with non-academic stakeholders to develop a discussion assistant prototype that i) identifies likely problematic comments for a possible rephrasing and ii) offers authors help with reformulation by letting generative AI suggest improvements like more civil wording. In this paper, we describe the process of co-creative research and the current status of the discussion assistant, which is still being developed and improved.