So we should start by doing the next best thing immediately: holding a global public consultation run primarily online, because that is the only format fast enough. Using these companies’ best models to ask everyday people urgent questions about AI — What do you want this technology to do for you, if anything? To be sure, any document produced through AI models based on the input of a massive but possibly unrepresentative fraction of humanity would have limited legitimacy. This is evidence that public input doesn’t just confer legitimacy, it can make a model better. The U.N., which has just begun assembling its own scaffolding for global AI governance, would be the natural convener of the concluding global assembly — and the guarantor that a process started by tech companies does not end as one owned by them.