The Hidden Frame: How Large Language Models Impact Democratic Society

arXiv:2609.07735v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are rapidly becoming an interface between citizens and political information. They are often regarded as "a better Google." While this analogy might work for some instances, it is unintuitively problematic for democratic politics. A search engine retrieves human-authored documents, while a language model generates novel text that necessarily embeds invisible framing decisions. Because conveying knowledge involves framing, a system that generates answers cannot serve as a neutral conduit to "all human knowledge." Instead, these systems are becoming a new kind of political intermediary. Mechanistic evidence shows that partisan identity is encoded as a locatable geometric direction inside the Llama 3.1 8B model, and that alignment training masks rather than removes this structure. Building on that evidence, we use the model's training cutoff in 2023 to make those frames visible. This cutpoint auspiciously falls just before a dramatic realignment in American politics marked by the second Trump administration and the MAHA transformation of health politics, providing us with a natural experiment. We find that the model presents temporally contingent partisan alignments as {\em knowledge}, with no reliable mechanism for distinguishing fact from opinion. Because citizens judge political claims by who made them and when, an answer that carries neither cue hampers the judgment on which self-governance depends. Large language models purporting to summarize "all human knowledge" are, in actuality, simply magnifying the cultural and partisan divides inherent in their training data.