General purpose AI, such as ChatGPT, seems to have lowered the barriers for the public to use AI and harness its power. However, the governance and development of AI still remain in the hands of a few, and the pace of development is accelerating without proper assessment of risks. As a first step towards democratic governance and risk assessment of AI, we introduce Particip-AI, a framework to gather current and future AI use cases and their harms and benefits from non-expert public. Our framework allows us to study more nuanced and detailed public opinions on AI through collecting use cases, surfacing diverse harms through risk assessment under alternate scenarios (i.e., developing and not developing a use case), and illuminating tensions over AI development through making a concluding choice on its development. To showcase the promise of our framework towards guiding democratic AI, we gather responses from 295 demographically diverse participants. We find that participants' responses emphasize applications for personal life and society, contrasting with most current AI development's business focus. This shows the value of surfacing diverse harms that are complementary to expert assessments. Furthermore, we found that perceived impact of not developing use cases predicted participants' judgements of whether AI use cases should be developed, and highlighted lay users' concerns of techno-solutionism. We conclude with a discussion on how frameworks like Particip-AI can further guide democratic AI governance and regulation.

翻译：通用人工智能（如ChatGPT）似乎降低了公众使用并驾驭AI的门槛。然而，AI的治理与开发仍掌握在少数人手中，且开发步伐在缺乏充分风险评估的情况下不断加速。作为迈向AI民主化治理与风险评估的第一步，我们提出“参与式人工智能”（Particip-AI）——一个从非专家公众中收集当前及未来AI用例及其危害与益处的框架。该框架通过收集用例、在替代情境（即开发与不开发某用例）下通过风险评估揭示多元危害，以及通过要求公众对AI开发做出最终选择以阐明开发中的矛盾张力，从而能够研究更细致、更深入的公众对AI的看法。为展示该框架在引导民主化AI方面的潜力，我们收集了295名人口统计学背景各异参与者的反馈。研究发现，参与者的回应更强调AI在个人生活与社会中的应用，这与当前多数AI开发以商业为中心的模式形成对比。这揭示了专家评估之外补充性多元危害的价值。此外，我们发现不开发用例的感知影响可预测参与者对AI用例是否应被开发的判断，并凸显了非专业用户对技术解决方案主义的担忧。最后，我们讨论了诸如Particip-AI此类框架如何进一步引导民主化AI治理与监管。