The paper examines how Preference Inference (PI) models used in large-scale participatory democracy platforms can alter the perceived consensus and minority support by predicting missing votes. It introduces a collective‑centric evaluation framework that assesses whether inferred votes maintain key properties of the overall preference landscape, rather than focusing solely on individual prediction accuracy. Using the largest multilingual dataset to date—four consultations with over 90,000 participants, 1 million votes, and 22 languages—the study finds that models with similar predictive accuracy can differ markedly in how well they preserve the collective structure, underscoring that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating PI in democratic contexts.
By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Salim Hafid, Paul Lerner, Nazanin Shafiabadi, Laur\`ene Cave, David Mas, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Benjamin Piwowarski, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
arXiv:2605. 01642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prevailing alignment methods target a fixed set of preferences and therefore risk forcing value lock-in as societal norms evolve over time.
By Rachel Freedman
arXiv:2606. 12754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment?
By Danica Dillion, Chen Cecilia Liu, Baihui Wang, Daniele Barolo, Tanmay Rajore, Niket Tandon, Pranathi Ravikumar, Kurt Gray
VoteGEO-Bench is a benchmark that examines how generative engine optimization (GEO) affects the visibility of election-related web content in large language model responses. It covers the 2024 U.S. presidential election and the 2026 Japanese House of Representatives election, using election queries, historical webpages, and voter personas. The study evaluates 11 rewriting strategies, finding that target‑specified rewrites and those that improve page organization or strengthen arguments increase exposure more than other tactics, while partisan identities can create larger baseline exposure gaps than a single rewritten page.
By Shiqi Zhang, Xiaokui Xiao
arXiv:2608. 15871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) trained on large-scale internet corpora encode extensive statistical regularities about social identities, attitudes, and political behaviour.
By Roman Neruda, Martin Bako\v{s}, Josef \v{S}lerka, V\'it Tu\v{c}ek, Petra Vidnerov\'a, Gabriela Kadlecov\'a
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for election information, yet little is known about how external web content shapes the political information they present. Generative engine optimiz...
arXiv:2608. 14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstay for information retrieval and summarization tasks, ensuring that they are always non-partisan and invulnerable to political bias is a critical step towards safer and more trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).
By Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Bruce Coburn, Bryce J. Dietrich, Robert X. Browning, Edward J. Delp, Fengqing Zhu
The paper introduces DIAL, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as judges while mitigating position bias and aligning their judgments with human preferences. DIAL separates judge‑specific position effects, learns shared structure in debiased LLM preferences, and adaptively calibrates this structure toward human targets using limited human comparisons. Experiments on simulations and three human‑preference benchmarks show that DIAL remains robust to unbalanced response order, achieves strong human‑aligned rankings with few labels, and adapts when LLM information is imperfect, supported by a real‑data study of over 410K judgments from 21 LLM judges.
By Zesheng Cai, Yingqi Fan, Sichang Chen, Jin-Hong Du
The paper argues that AI can strengthen democracy by supporting large‑scale deliberation, addressing cognitive, social, platform‑design, and market frictions while preserving human agency. It contrasts AI‑assisted deliberation with liquid democracy, claiming the former lowers barriers to meaningful engagement without replacing human judgment. The authors outline four guiding principles—preserving agency, encouraging mutual respect, promoting equality, and augmenting active citizenship—and discuss challenges such as alignment, sycophancy, bias, and over‑reliance. They call on the machine learning community to develop and evaluate deliberation‑focused AI systems based on their ability to facilitate informed, representative, and friction‑robust discourse.
By Jos\'e Ram\'on Enr\'iquez, Jiaxin Pei, Alex Pentland
The paper introduces Population Fidelity, an evaluation framework for assessing how well large language models (LLMs) represent human population attitudes. It focuses on three dimensions: group-level accuracy, between-group variation, and the structure of that variation. Using the framework, the authors replicate a prior study on machine bias and test cultural fine-tuning, finding that while fine-tuning improves overall alignment, it does not enhance representation of within-population differences.
By Neemias B. da Silva, Martin Lukk, Ali Sutani, Abhishek Moturu, Harris Yang, Daniel Silver, Matt Ratto, Thiago H. Silva
arXiv:2609.15207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Generative AI writing assistants and the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power them are increasingly part of how voters gather information before ele...
By Bastiaan Bruinsma, Annika Fred\'en, Paul R\"ottger, Moa Johansson, Asad Sayeed
AI systems can strengthen democracy by supporting deliberation at scale by addressing cognitive, social, platform-design, and market-driven frictions, while preserving human agency. Unlike proposals s...