Digital deliberation has expanded democratic participation, yet challenges remain. This includes processing information at scale, moderating discussions, fact-checking, or attracting people to participate. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer potential solutions, but
public perceptions of AI’s role in deliberation remain underexplored. Beyond efficiency, democratic deliberation is about voice and recognition. If AI is integrated into deliberation, public trust, acceptance, and willingness to participate may be affected. We conducted a preregistered survey experiment with a representative sample in Germany (n=1850) to examine how information about AI-enabled deliberation influences willingness to participate and perceptions of deliberative quality. Respondents were randomly assigned to treatments that provided them information about
deliberative tasks facilitated by either AI or humans. This allows us to identify causal effects. Our findings reveal a significant AI-penalty. Participants were less willing to engage in AI-facilitated deliberation and rated its quality lower than human-led formats. These effects were moderated by
individual predispositions. Perceptions of AI’s societal benefits and anthropomorphization of AI showed positive interaction effects on people’s interest to participate in AI-enabled deliberative formats and positive quality assessments, while AI risk assessments showed negative interactions
with information about AI-enabled deliberation. These results suggest AI-enabled deliberation faces substantial public skepticism, potentially even introducing a new deliberative divide. Unlike traditional participation gaps based on education or demographics, this divide is shaped by attitudes toward AI. As democratic engagement increasingly moves online, ensuring AI’s role in deliberation does not discourage participation or deepen inequalities will be a key challenge for future research and policy.