Trustworthy or knave? – scoring politicians with AI in real-time

One solution to mitigate current polarization and disinformation could be to give humans cognitive assistance using AI. With AI, all publicly available information on politicians can be fact-checked and examined live for consistency. Next, such checks can be attractively visualized by independently overlaying various features. These could be traditional visualizations like bar charts or pie charts, but also ones less common in politics today – for example, ones used in filters in popular apps (Instagram, TikTok, etc.) or even halos, devil horns, and alike. Such a tool represents a novel way of mediating political experience in democracy, which can empower the public. However, it also introduces threats such as errors, involvement of malicious third parties, or lack of political will to field such AI cognitive assistance. We demonstrate that proper cryptographic design principles can curtail the involvement of malicious third parties. Moreover, we call for research on the social and ethical aspects of AI cognitive assistance to mitigate future threats.