Professor Contributes to International Collaboration Examining AI and Democracy

Becoming the Editor-in-Chief of the Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Values Index (AIDV) for the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP) is part of my journey to become an expert in AI policy. About three years ago, I decided to shift my research focus from sports and democracy to AI and democracy. If you look at the title of my book—Pitching Democracy: Baseball and Politics in the Dominican Republic—it can be hard to see the continuity in my research focus. But my interest in how people engage with and shape democracy in their everyday interactions and discussions about popular culture, whether that be baseball or AI, underlies everything I do.

Learning a new research field looks a lot different when you’re a parent and working and teaching full time. In my M.A. and Ph.D. programs, I read and discussed at least three books/week and did research on my topic. Learning was my full-time job (along with the teaching and waiting tables I did to pay rent and eat). My approach to learning about AI has been more applied and professionally oriented. I took a lot of LinkedIn Learning classes and have done some other online learning through programs such as Udemy.

A networking call with an AI Ethicist led me to CAIDP, where I completed their AI Policy clinics during the 2023–2024 academic year. I began this academic year in the policy group, where I contributed to CAIDP’s recommendations to Australia (for example) on their proposed guidelines for high-risk AI systems. I completed a sample edit of an AIDV chapter as part of my application and earned the editor job.

The AIDV is a collaborative effort. The 200+ people completing the AI Policy Clinic each semester, known as the research group, identify material to update the 80 country reports in the AIDV. My job was to integrate the updates into the existing report, which is part copyediting and part research. I also wrote brief introductions to each country report, highlighting the most significant AI policy developments, and an introductory chapter: “A Year in Review,” where I described the current state of AI policy and some of the most significant developments globally. The 2025 edition of the AIDV came in at 1,466 pages and has more than 7,000 footnotes. As a next step, I’m working on a class that uses the AIDV as a reference or textbook.

CAIDP’s single biggest event each year is the AIDV launch, which I attended in Washington, D.C.. This AI Policy Roundtable brought together academics, policymakers, and practitioners from around the world. We had people from Europe, Africa, Latin America, Oceania, Canada, and the United States on Zoom and in person to discuss the gains in and opportunities for AI, related to human rights and democratic values.

The morning session centered on the AIDV, and I moderated a panel of academics with Julian Theseira, a CAIDP colleague, where we discussed some of the challenges of quantitative metrics for ranking countries as diverse as Ghana and Switzerland (for example) on AIDV metrics, which define democratic values and human rights by largely western standards. As the panel pointed out, many of the metrics in the AIDV measure democratic institutions more than AI policies.

Much of the conference centered on protecting democracy, or, really, expanding it, in the face of authoritarianism. CAIDP AI Policy Leader Award winners Saifa Nobel, Maya Wiley, and Sasha Luccioni discussed how to incentivize AI development in line with democratic values, human rights, and sustainability.

Recorded remarks by Connecticut’s own U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal celebrated the AIDV and called for federal legislation to encourage the same. In his recorded remarks, AI Policy Leader Award winner Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN undersecretary general and special envoy for digital and emerging technologies, stressed the need for global efforts to ensure everyone can benefit from AI technologies and the need to protect against a world of “AI haves and have nots.”

The event and experience editing the AIDV refueled my desire to contribute to these discussions and this future where we all have access to the benefits AI can bring us, while also protecting against the risks to society, learning, and the environment. Throughout my exploration of AI policy and ethics, I always come back to the realization that we shape the future, and what AI is, or is not, in that future. As a historian, I find that realization to be both terrifying and freeing. But, mano a la obra!

April Yoder, Ph.D. is an associate professor of History.