AI Facilitator Allows Participants to Conduct a Friendly Discussion and Contribute to Feasible Proposals

This paper added an AI facilitator function to a discussion board system (DBS) for the purpose of guiding a discussion in an appropriate direction. Each participant who uses the DBS on their individual screen can express their own opinions by moving words to boxes made for each item to be discussed. The improved DBS (ver. 2.1) presented comments to those participants who had not spoken or operated any words on the screen for a designated period of time. When all participants in the discussion placed the same word in the same box, the word color changed to green. Here, four participants held an online discussion with their cameras off using DBS ver. 2.1. The results of a questionnaire showed that the prompts from DBS encouraged the participants to talk and add the words to the boxes. The sight of the green-colored text gave participants a feeling of pleasure, knowing that the other participants agreed with their opinion. Contrary to the experimenter’s hypothesis, there were no disagreements, because all participants recognized an idea as “excellent.” However, the idea came to be a realistic and immediately feasible proposal, because the participants discussed it by asking each other whether they had placed the same word in the same box, although the underlying assumption of DBS is that the participants will not disclose to each other the words they put into the boxes.