WHO: Gabor Hollbeck (ETH Zurich), Alec McGail (Cornell University)
WHAT: The Challenge
In today’s complex media landscape, citizens face an unprecedented challenge: navigating biased, fragmented, and often contradictory information. By providing tools and pursuing research on them, this project entails two subdomains of R&D that enable citizens to navigate our complex world’s intricacies:
The first addresses the urgent need to transform “vibes-based opinionation” into informed, rational decision-making. By leveraging advanced AI, we are offering tools that empower users to critically assess political information and recognize media bias. Electomate, our AI-powered voting advice platform, offers questionnaires and interactive chats & voice calls with official party programs and tailored AI internet searches to deepen political understanding beyond simplistic black and white answers.
The second subdomain, Diplomatica.ai, provides AI simulated conversations to train empathy and conflict-resolution skills. Together, these initiatives strive to reduce societal polarization, improve democratic deliberation, and foster empathy in political discourse, ensuring that information literacy and rationality become the norms in political engagement.
WHY: Motivations & Intentions
The digital age has radically transformed how we acquire knowledge, shape opinions, and make decisions. In response, our work is driven by a commitment to counteract the divisive effects of biased media and cognitive shortcuts that undermine democracy. We believe that addressing today’s challenges requires two complementary schools: one that fosters a deep understanding of facts, scientific evidence, and systemic thinking, and another that nurtures self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and overall wellbeing. By developing scientifically rigorous yet widely accessible AI tools, our projects empower citizens to transform the way political information is accessed and understood. This approach not only enhances democratic deliberation by providing deeper, unbiased insights into political topics, but also sets new benchmarks for emotional intelligence in public discourse-making empathy and informed decision-making as essential as technical expertise in modern society.
HOW: Methods & Tools
- Integrate SOTA LLMs with Interactive, User-centered Design
- Our tools, “Electomate” and “Diplomatica”, are based on Agentic AI pipelines and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and process hand-curated, official data sources-including party manifestos and records of political debates-thereby reducing bias and hallucination
- “Electomate” employs questionnaires and interactive (voice-) chat interfaces that connect users with official party programs, complemented by a prototype bias checker that objectively analyzes media content. Thereby users are efficiently enabled to find the political representative closest to their needs and opinions
- While this tool doesn’t collect user data and is open source, a survey with politicians and party members will be used to evaluate and enhance the accuracy of the algorithm
- Simulate Real-life Scenarios
- “Diplomatica” allows users to choose from diverse AI personas and engage in conversations. The situations span from political debates to emotionally charged interactions in the personal settings, covering the entire spectrum of perspectives and controversies
- Integrate insights from communication trainers and interpersonal communication researchers to refine our conversational frameworks and assess how effectively users navigate complex political and interpersonal situations
- Iterative prototyping, A/B testing, and extensive user studies rigorously assess tool accuracy, social acceptance, and the impact on political trust, ensuring our methods are robust and globally applicable
HOW CAN I JOIN? Activities & Events in 2025
- Spring 2025 (tentative): Hackathon in Zurich or Boston
- Focused on scaling and automating Electomate’s pipeline for international elections, scheduled for April to June, 2025 (tentative)
- Fall 2025 (July-September): Workshop at MIT: “Conflict Resolution and Diplomatic Communication”
- Explore Diplomatica.ai’s applications in real-world scenarios, scheduled for July to September, 2025 (tentative)
For further details, visit Electomate.com and Diplomatica.ai, or contact the project leaders.