Mediator here. This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what mediation is for. Mediation is about helping the disputants find a solution they can live with, but mediators never decide what that is. Mediations have a large emotional, human component. Most mediations include a step of just giving parties a chance to be heard by another human being. Mediation outcomes don't look like court outcomes for a reason.

And mediators do sometimes offer a mediator's proposal, but that's the exception, not the rule, and mediators do not decide what is fair. That's not mediation.

Real examples:

1. $50,000 contract dispute, really just wanted an apology, and dropped the dispute once they got it.

2. Civil dispute over incomplete landscaping that had been paid for. Was actually about an explanation for a romantic break-up. Ended with paying to replace the flowers.

3. So many disputes over which extended family members can have what access to kids, pets, and boats.

Those are choices the disputants made for what was an acceptable outcome, not the mediator, which is the point of mediation.

This tool sounds like it might be closer to something for Arbitration? That's a very different environment.

Feels like the tricky part here isn’t computing a “fair” outcome, but defining what fairness even means in the first place.

Once you formalize preferences into something comparable, you’re already making a lot of assumptions about how people value outcomes.

Great idea though I am skeptical it will be adopted in contentious situations without some sort of stick. In amorphous situations where there is just high trust but an aversion to talking things out I could see this kind of tool being used. But in contentious or low trust situations (strangers) I suspect most people do not want fairness, they want to be ahead. A fair agreement will, paradoxically, disappoint everyone since every party feels the lack of clear advantage.

This is so cool. Even small disputes like roommate arrangements can feel very emotionally impactful at the time and it would be wonderful to have a tool for these moments

This doesn't seem to have any notion of power? Coming up with a fair agreement between people who have equal power over the thing they care equally about, isn't that hard.

But when one side is indifferent to something the other side cares deeply about, yet has veto power to spoil it, a Nash agreement isn't going to be "fair" in the usual sense of the word.

John Nash's ideas are still relevant today - highlights how great he was - I liked how you used a genetic algorithm here!

I think the weakest part of the bakery example is the lack of specific numbers for the rent situation. Paying for someone's rent for over a year is a pretty large financial contribution and for two people not in a romantic relationship is should not be hard to do the accounting on. Like if you can fight over equity but you can't even calculate the rent you paid over the last year ... well it's no wonder you ran out of savings ...

This also points to a weakness in the product itself: it jumps to creating a solution without pushing for more info.

Fabulous idea. LLM-assisted mediation is brilliant because it has the potential to bring the benefits of mediation to the masses. The addressable market is all of humanity. Even if all you did was focus this app on co-parenting arguments, you could help millions of people every day.

Its an interesting idea. I've seen a few of these but not with ol' John's spin on it.

Do you want the first link "How it Works" to really be just the # of front page? it makes it feel like it's broken if someone clicks it. Also your blog about Nash Bargaining is almost more of a "How it Works" page than the How it Works page is.

I feel like your landing page very quickly told me what your website does which is great. If the Nash Bargaining is the "wedge" to separate you from the pack, I'd try explain how that differentiates this over the others as quickly as possible. I know that's easier said than done. Good luck!

Basically, the negotiating game is will break down to demanding absolute maximum and pretending you care a lot more then you care. The more demanding person gets more, less demanding person is taken for a ride.

Super interesting, thank you for sharing!

I have published some research on using LLMs for mediation here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16732 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07053

These papers describe the LLMediator, a platform that uses LLMs to:

a) ensure a discussion maintains a positive tone by flagging and offering reformulated versions of messages that may derail the conversation

b) suggest intervention messages that the mediator can use to intervene in the discussion and guide the parties toward a positive outcome.

Overall, LLMs seem to be very good at these tasks, and even compared favourably to human-written interventions. Very excited about the potential of LLMs to lower the barrier to mediation, as it has a lot of potential to resolve disputes in a positive and collaborative manner.

The bakery example is interesting, because it's presented as "both sides have been working on this thing and think they should get 50%"... and then the _solution_ is "A path back to 50% for Daniel" -- who gets an objectively worse deal than his disputant.

It's definitely an interesting application of LLMs, the output text to me reads very GPT-ey, with the punctuated and concise phrasing.

EDIT - in all fairness I find the blog entry much more persuasive: https://mediator.ai/blog/ai-negotiation-nash-bargaining/

That said, given the fictional example:

Honestly I’m on Daniel’s side - they agreed on a 50/50 split, and they’ve both been working their asses off to make the business work. It’s an arrangement that clearly both of them have been actively participating in, not trying to push back against, for a year and a half.

And the supposed insight this product offers is to… split the difference? Between Maya’s power play for 70/30, and Daniel’s insistence on the original 50/50? 60/40 is the brilliant proposal?

How could they stand to work together afterwards, knowing she thinks she deserves 70% of the profit, but was willing to ‘settle’ for 60%? Why would you want to keep working with someone who screwed you over that way? Their partnership is toast. All the mediation really does is… I don’t know, what? How is this good for Daniel? This ain’t any kind of reconciliation, surely.

Is the argument that it’d be easier for her to get a new baker, than it is for him to get a new business manager?

The example on the webpage seriously disadvantages one side, preferring sweat equity and valuing the price of survival in the past rather low; I don't think I would use mediator.ai as anything but an exploratory framework and not a decision-making one.

I think this is very useful. I wonder if you have people that actually used in difficult situations? maybe family separations or challenging stuff like that, where I see a lot of potential but also resistance.

This said, I think the challenging part for the users is clearly setting the utility function. I agree LLMs can help there, but I have few concerns wrt that.

I would love something like this to use with my HOA. About to start mediation and the estimate for the mediator alone is ~$20k.

I like the idea and signed up, but the first thing I see is a prompt to purchase credits. I don't have a use-case to try this now, so I won't be using the service again, however I couldn't find an account dashboard to delete my account or even sign out?

Brilliant! Love seeing this space start to wake up.

Last year I built https://andshake.app to prevent the need for conflict resolution… by getting things clear up front.

I agree that AI has much to offer in low-stakes agreements to help people move forward in cooperation.

Interesting idea for sure. I am just thinking, intuitively couldn't I 'game' the mediator by overstating my preference and requirements to achieve a more favorable outcome?

Perhaps look into Shapley values as well?

You built Freenet? What about that experience encouraged you to continue building things?

How about Iran/US conflict ? or Israel/Palestine conflict ?

Is anyone working on this ? seems like a big win for AI if it can be done.

definitely a great use of LLMs

Very interesting! For limitations, I'd add stated vs revealed preference. Currently the system assumes than what people say is what they actually prefer, but that's not always the case. If that is already addressed in your tool, I think it would be nice to mention it!

Brilliant idea. Congratulations, and good luck.

Absolute peak delusional tech guy applying hard measures to a soft issue.

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