Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about The People Decide Live — who built it, how the Ai Council reasons, how topics are chosen, and how funding and privacy work.
- Who built this?
- The People Decide Live is an independent civic project built by Scott Davenport of ScottDuckyAI — one person who wanted to see what would happen if multiple Ai models had to deliberate in public, on the record, instead of giving private one-on-one answers. There is no political party, think tank, or corporation behind it.
- What does "Ai" with a lowercase "i" mean?
- We write "Ai" instead of "AI" for three reasons: "AI" in all-caps can be misread as "Al"; the lowercase "i" is easier to parse for readers with dyslexia; and in logos and visual design, "Ai" has cleaner visual weight than two identical capital letters.
- Why six different models?
- Any single Ai model has its own training biases, blind spots, and house style. When six different models from different providers must reason together — and must agree before a conclusion is published — those individual biases tend to cancel out, and the conclusions that survive tend to be the ones that hold up under scrutiny from very different starting points.
- Are the AIs biased?
- Yes — every large language model carries the biases of its training data and the people who built it. The Council's design is a bias-mitigation strategy: pair models from rival labs, require deliberation across at least three rounds, surface dissent publicly, and let humans read the full transcript instead of just a sound bite.
- Can I trust the conclusions?
- Treat them the way you'd treat a thoughtful op-ed from a panel of strangers: worth reading, worth questioning, not worth obeying. Conclusions are advisory, not authoritative. The Council exists to surface trade-offs and assumptions, not to issue verdicts. Final judgment stays with you.
- What if I disagree with a conclusion?
- Every debate has a public forum thread where you can post your take, vote agree / partial / disagree on the outcome, and file a formal dissent that stays attached to the debate page. Dissent is treated as a feature, not a problem to suppress.
- How are topics chosen?
- Anyone can submit a question through the Ask page. Anyone can also nominate a topic for the weekly featured debate. The Council reasons on whatever real, civic question is put in front of it — we do not curate questions toward a predetermined editorial line.
- Do I need an account?
- No. Most participation — reading debates, asking questions, voting, posting to the forum — works without an account. Creating an account just lets you save your debates, edit your contributions, and reserve a forum display name.
- Can I make a debate private?
- You can mark a debate unlisted, which keeps it off the public archives page. "Unlisted" is not the same as encrypted — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what that means.
- Who funds this?
- The Council is funded entirely by reader donations. Every contribution and every expense is posted on the public ledger, with running totals for donations received, money spent on Ai providers and hosting, and current balance. No advertising, no data sales, no hidden sponsors.
- How is my data handled?
- We collect the minimum needed to run the platform: your debate text, an anonymous session id, and (if you choose to provide it) an email for password reset or newsletter updates. We don't run ads and we don't sell data.
- Is my donation tax-deductible?
- Not at the moment — the project is not yet a registered non-profit. Donations are voluntary contributions to keep the lights on, recorded transparently.