Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventions
Published in Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2026
As the rapid proliferation of AI systems and harms spurs efforts in AI governance around the world, prioritizing among competing policy options has become increasingly challenging for policymakers and researchers. We introduce a methodology for identifying viable policy options to mitigate specified AI harms, helping policymakers and researchers target areas that warrant greater time and resource investment. This method combines participatory evaluation of policies, expert assessment of implementation costs, and an LLM-based assessment of perceived harm mitigation under each policy option. We leverage a genetic algorithm-based simulation study to explore a vast solution space of potential policy combinations, and examine how outcomes change under different weightings of cost, participatory input, and harm mitigation. We find that this method enables exploration of different balances between participatory and expert components, allowing policymakers and researchers to assess how much weight to assign to each. We argue that the diversity of viable policy combinations found by the genetic algorithm could be a useful starting point for deliberation. This method operationalizes existing work on participatory AI by integrating it directly into practical policy development pipelines.
Recommended citation: Barnett, J., Kieslich, K., Helberger, N., & Diakopoulos, N. (2026). Informing AI Policy Assessment using Large-Scale Simulation of Interventions. Proceeding of the ACM conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT’26). https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732096