  There is growing consensus that language model (LM) developers should not be
the sole deciders of LM behavior, creating a need for methods that enable the
broader public to collectively shape the behavior of LM systems that affect
them. To address this need, we present Collective Constitutional AI (CCAI): a
multi-stage process for sourcing and integrating public input into LMs-from
identifying a target population to sourcing principles to training and
evaluating a model. We demonstrate the real-world practicality of this approach
by creating what is, to our knowledge, the first LM fine-tuned with
collectively sourced public input and evaluating this model against a baseline
model trained with established principles from a LM developer. Our quantitative
evaluations demonstrate several benefits of our approach: the CCAI-trained
model shows lower bias across nine social dimensions compared to the baseline
model, while maintaining equivalent performance on language, math, and
helpful-harmless evaluations. Qualitative comparisons of the models suggest
that the models differ on the basis of their respective constitutions, e.g.,
when prompted with contentious topics, the CCAI-trained model tends to generate
responses that reframe the matter positively instead of a refusal. These
results demonstrate a promising, tractable pathway toward publicly informed
development of language models.
