AI Participants in Democracy: Exploring Human-Robot Relations in a Deliberative Forum

The rapid advancements of generative AI and robotics deeply affect democracy. AI agents increasingly appear not simply as tools, but as participants: for example as synthetic politicians, activists, or moderators of deliberative forums. While human–AI relations have been widely examined in social and workplace contexts, there is no research on human perception of AI in democratic participation. Furthermore, the physical presence of embodied AI in deliberative settings, enabled by the recent deployment of robotic systems integrated with large language models, has not yet been the subject of empirical research. The project “Robots in the Room: Democratic Agency and AI-augmented Deliberation” investigates the potential of including embodied AI as participant in democracy, focusing on human agency and relations to AI in deliberative settings. Rather than making an argument for the inclusion of AI participants, this exploratory study raises the question how human participants relate to an perceive synthetic participants. To address these research questions, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach that bridges political science, robotics, and psychology. Six small-group deliberations were conducted, with each group composed of four humans and one humanoid robot, Pepper. Linked to generative AI, Pepper expressed a defined view as a participant in the deliberation. Based on the analysis of 24 qualitative interviews that took place after the deliberations, this paper investigates human participants’ emotional responses and attitudes toward the robot participant shedding new light on the role embodied AI could and should play in democracy.