From Ballots to Budgets: Can LLMs Be Trusted as Social Planners?
When you think of AI in public decision-making, you might picture chatbots handling service requests or predictive models flagging infrastructure risks. But what if we let large language models (LLMs) actually allocate resources—acting as digital social planners? That’s exactly what this new study tested, using Participatory Budgeting (PB) both as a practical decision-making task and a dynamic benchmark for LLM reasoning. Why Participatory Budgeting Is the Perfect Testbed PB is more than a budgeting exercise. Citizens propose and vote on projects—parks, public toilets, community centers—and decision-makers choose a subset to fund within a fixed budget. It’s a constrained optimization problem with a human twist: budgets, diverse preferences, and sometimes mutually exclusive projects. ...