Hundreds join AI-powered public consultation on car-less Tomas Morato Avenue

MANILA, Philippines – For the first time in the Philippines, a newsroom and a city council used generative artificial intelligence (AI) to gather public sentiments about a public policy — a proposed ordinance to declare Tomas Morato Avenue car-free on Sundays.

Rappler, through a partnership with the office of Quezon City Councilor Irene Belmonte, hosted four virtual public consultation sessions on its aiDialogue platform and news app in August.

Around 250 people were able to join the sessions, in total. Over 1,400 responses were sent in by participants, which were counted and then summarized by the aiDialogue platform, generating a final output for all four sessions.

All participants answered five main questions which were formulated by Rappler and the office of Councilor Belmonte, who is behind the proposed ordinance and who represents the city’s Fourth District, which encompasses Tomas Morato Avenue and nearby barangays.

The questions were based on issues that came up during Belmonte’s first public consultation about the proposal.

The five questions, written in Filipino on the aiDialogue platform, were:

The aiDialogue platform then asked a follow-up question, based on the responses given, for each of the five questions above.

The virtual sessions took place on August 21, 24, 23, and 26.

All the sessions were conducted on Rappler’s aiDialogue platform, which participants could access through laptops or gadgets, as long as there was internet connection. All participants were anonymized, known only by an avatar with an animal name generated randomly.

All participants could see the responses sent by others in the session. They could also view the summary of responses to each question, as generated by the AI platform.

At the end of the roughly two-hour sessions, the platform posted a final output — a summary of all the responses to all questions — that all participants could read.

Rappler is currently collating all the summaries for all four sessions and will submit a final report to the Quezon City Council. Rappler will also be publishing a news report about this on our website.

A majority of participants believed the provision of parking areas near Tomas Morato