The Framing Gap: Strategic Claim Bridging and the Limits of Generative AI Interpretation in Brand Representation

Generative AI systems increasingly mediate how brands are described, compared, and recommended. While such systems can retrieve evidence, generate candidate explanations, and synthesise existing patterns, this paper argues they cannot be relied upon to produce externally accountable, entity-specific, evidence-grounded interpretive frames without external support. The paper identifies that dependency as the Framing Gap: the gap between evidence available to a generative system and the interpretive context required for the system to describe a brand confidently and distinctively. A three-level model of brand-AI communication is proposed: Scattered Proof of claims, where evidence exists but remains disconnected;…