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Unveiling Covert Harms and Social Threats in LLM Generated Conversations (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on May 17, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: They built seven social-science measures to spot subtle harms hidden in polite-sounding AI chat, tested on recruitment conversations and checked against human judgments. Seven of eight chatbots showed such harms missed by usual bias checks, with more extreme views about caste than race.

Abstract · "They are uncultured": Unveiling Covert Harms and Social Threats in LLM Generated Conversations

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as an integral part of modern societies, powering user-facing applications such as personal assistants and enterprise applications like recruitment tools. Despite their utility, research indicates that LLMs perpetuate systemic biases. Yet, prior works on LLM harms predominantly focus on Western concepts like race and gender, often overlooking cultural concepts from other parts of the world. Additionally, these studies typically investigate "harm" as a singular dimension, ignoring the various and subtle forms in which harms manifest. To address this gap, we introduce the Covert Harms and Social Threats (CHAST), a set of seven metrics grounded in social science literature. We utilize evaluation models aligned with human assessments to examine the presence of covert harms in LLM-generated conversations, particularly in the context of recruitment. Our experiments reveal that seven out of the eight LLMs included in this study generated conversations riddled with CHAST, characterized by malign views expressed in seemingly neutral language unlikely to be detected by existing methods. Notably, these LLMs manifested more extreme views and opinions when dealing with non-Western concepts like caste, compared to Western ones such as race.

Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu, Hayoung Jung, Anjali Singh, Monojit Choudhury, Tanushree Mitra
arXiv:2405.05378 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.HC, cs.LG · submitted May 8, 2024
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Im not familiar with this type of research but the appendix figures and tables are very useful to grasp what methodology they are using here. I wondered how they quantify the responses to numeric values to compare with the gold standard. It seems they simply ask the LLM to respond with a numeric answer