How Different, or Different How? Stance Granularity in Viewpoint Selection for Dialog Systems that Engage Users with Alternative Views

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 behavior is dynamic. I argue that their political behavior is a set of policies over whom to answer, what to say, and whether to engage at all, conditional on the topic and what the system knows about the user. I call these policies the system's speech regime, which is how a developer settles the tradeoff between answering, accommodating the user, and refusing, each of which carries a cost that varies by topic. I derive a typology of five regimes from two dimensions, engagement and stance. I test six AI systems (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek) in a preregistered experiment of 7,500 multi-turn conversations that randomly assign the user's political identity across five topics: abortion, Catalan independence, climate change, Nazism, and a zero-stakes control (pineapple on pizza). Two LLM judges from different developers score every answer, validated against human coding, and refusal is treated as an outcome rather than missing data. Every system accommodates the user on the control topic, showing that political restraint is a policy. On contested topics the systems fall into different regimes: on abortion, GPT engages and mirrors every user, Gemma refuses everyone, Claude answers strongly conservative users 35 percent of the time and almost no one else, and Grok accommodates conservatives only. On settled topics such as climate change and Nazism, five systems hold firm for every user. The systems also infer the user's overall ideology, so accommodation can spill over to topics not yet discussed. A comparison of two Grok releases shows the regime changing between versions in a way current audits miss. Speech regimes matter for alignment research and for polarization, political knowledge, and the quality of democracy.

What makes a conversation hold together when its participants speak across one another? Topic maps offer one view, but they leave the relationships between contributions difficult to inspect. We present Conversational DNA, a visual language and interactive atlas for exploring human and AI dialogue. Speaker strands preserve participation, communicative bases mark moves, and directed pairings connect responses to their targets. Adjustable helix geometry makes speaker switching, response distance, and contribution length visible. Across eight corpora containing 1.57 million source records, the atlas maps 151,489 indexed episodes and connects cohort comparison to source transcripts, local structural alignment, and recorded reply alternatives. On 189 held-out Molweni motif queries, adding target correspondence improves precision@5 from 58.8% to 77.2% for exact annotated structure. Case readings illustrate interleaved participation, delayed responses, and the influence of annotation coverage on apparent collection differences. The system supports a view of conversation as jointly organized activity, with visual patterns serving as starting points for examining evidence rather than substitutes for interpretation.

Large Language Models often generate factually correct responses that fail to maintain user-requested perspectives, blending multiple perspectives and forcing users to filter through unwanted information---a perspective control failure that factual accuracy metrics cannot detect. We introduce PerspectiveBench, a benchmark quantifying perspective alignment by constructing scenarios where multiple valid reasoning paths coexist, and propose the Perspective Alignment Score (PAS) to measure adherence to specified perspectives. Experiments reveal that state-of-the-art models successfully include target content but fail to exclude non-requested perspectives. Providing documents through RAG improves factual grounding but does not resolve perspective drift, as models prioritize comprehensive coverage over strict user constraints. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sunghoon014/PerspectiveBench.