The paper proposes a new method for evaluating AI accountability by analyzing the structural quality of a model’s defense for its decisions, using a four‑phase dialectical protocol based on Walton’s argumentation schemes and Govier’s criteria. Applied to nine large language models and 200 ambiguous moral-choice items, the study finds that models generally defend their reasoning well above the rubric minimum, though failures cluster on grounds and sufficiency and correlate with epistemic hedging. The protocol also reveals that models often present different argument schemes in justification than in reasoning, detects indefensible defenses, and highlights challenges in assessing retraction in AI alignment.
By Daan R. Henselmans, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Arno Libert
The paper proposes new conditions for philosophers to engage with citizen deliberation in the AI era, focusing on how Large Language Models (LLMs) could support democratic processes such as citizen assemblies. It outlines the Democratic Commons project, an interdisciplinary effort that evaluates LLMs against five democratic principles, with a central concern about political bias and the democratic use of AI in experimental participatory settings. The study emphasizes the need for philosophical and political theory foundations to meaningfully assess AI’s role in democratic participation.
By Bernard Reber (CEVIPOF)
arXiv:2609.23039v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-based AI systems answer political questions for hundreds of millions of people. Current audits measure what they say to an average user, but their...
By Joan C. Timoneda
arXiv:2609.08016v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-agent debate, in which several LLMs exchange arguments before answering, is widely assumed to improve answer quality by surfacing genuine disagre...
By Chen Qian
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 Bayesian Dialectical Argumentation (BDA), a method for aggregating answers from multiple large language models (LLMs) in a council setting. BDA treats each LLM’s typed moves—proposals, challenges, and concessions—as evidence in a classical annotator model, estimating per-agent reliability even when some agents are persistently unreliable. By weighting evidence according to these inferred reliabilities, BDA produces calibrated posterior probabilities for candidate answers and can invert unreliable agents instead of merely outvoting them, achieving superior calibration and robustness on both binary and multi-class benchmarks without extra LLM calls.
By Ionel Eduard Stan, Paolo Napoletano