Artificial Intelligence and the Conditions of Democratic Knowledge: Mapping Epistemic Citizenship in Contemporary Debates

The paper provides a structured overview of current debates on how artificial intelligence and data-driven systems increasingly influence the formation and revision of knowledge, in both intended and unintended ways, and how these developments affect epistemic agency, understood as the capacity to access, produce, contest and control knowledge and the processes by which they are formed. It situates these debates within democratic theory by highlighting that democratic agency fundamentally depends on epistemic agency, and argues that AI-induced transformations therefore pose significant challenges for deliberative and participatory models of democracy, which presuppose citizens’ reflective control over political knowledge and judgment.