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Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models

Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

97 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, VI. Automation, Access, and Environmental Harms. The first area concerns the perpetuation of stereotypes, unfair discrimination, exclusionary norms, toxic language, and lower performance by social group for LMs. The second focuses on risks from private data leaks or LMs correctly inferring sensitive information. The third addresses risks arising from poor, false or misleading information including in sensitive domains, and knock-on risks such as the erosion of trust in shared information. The fourth considers risks from actors who try to use LMs to cause harm. The fifth focuses on risks specific to LLMs used to underpin conversational agents that interact with human users, including unsafe use, manipulation or deception. The sixth discusses the risk of environmental harm, job automation, and other challenges that may have a disparate effect on different social groups or communities. In total, we review 21 risks in-depth. We discuss the points of origin of different risks and point to potential mitigation approaches. Lastly, we discuss organisational responsibilities in implementing mitigations, and the role of collaboration and participation. We highlight directions for further research, particularly on expanding the toolkit for assessing and evaluating the outlined risks in LMs.

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  • abstract This paper aims to help structure the risk landscape associated with large-scale Language Models (LMs). In order to foster advances in responsible innovation, an in-depth understanding of the potential risks posed by these models is needed. A wide range of established and anticipated risks are analysed in detail, drawing on multidisciplinary expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and social sciences. We outline six specific risk areas: I. Discrimination, Exclusion and Toxicity, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, V. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Inte

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representative citing papers

Measuring Safety Alignment Effects in Autonomous Security Agents

cs.CR · 2026-05-19 · conditional · novelty 7.0

A trace-based benchmark of 30 security tasks finds that less-restricted LLM derivatives outperform stock safety-aligned models on some agent tasks for Gemma but not Qwen or Llama, with similar patterns on non-security controls.

A Generalist Agent

cs.AI · 2022-05-12 · accept · novelty 7.0

Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

cs.CL · 2022-05-02 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.

Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning

cs.CV · 2022-04-29 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Flamingo models reach new state-of-the-art few-shot results on image and video tasks by bridging frozen vision and language models with cross-attention layers trained on interleaved web-scale data.

Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs

cs.LG · 2026-06-23 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Grad Detect uses internal gradient patterns from one inference pass to predict LLM hallucinations and abstention, outperforming confidence and sampling baselines on Q&A benchmarks with most signal in the final five layers.

citing papers explorer

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers after filters.

  • BiAxisAudit: A Novel Framework to Evaluate LLM Bias Across Prompt Sensitivity and Response-Layer Divergence cs.CL · 2026-05-09 · unverdicted · none · ref 2 · internal anchor

    BiAxisAudit measures LLM bias on two axes—across-prompt sensitivity via factorial grids and within-response divergence via split coding—revealing that task format explains as much variance as model choice and that 63.6% of bias signals appear in only one layer.

  • Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models cs.CL · 2023-05-25 · conditional · none · ref 127 · internal anchor

    Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.

  • Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models cs.CL · 2022-11-17 · unverdicted · none · ref 27 · internal anchor

    PromptInject shows that simple adversarial prompts can cause goal hijacking and prompt leaking in GPT-3, exploiting its stochastic behavior.

  • Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned cs.CL · 2022-08-23 · accept · none · ref 59 · internal anchor

    RLHF-aligned language models show increasing resistance to red teaming with scale up to 52B parameters, unlike prompted or rejection-sampled models, supported by a released dataset of 38,961 attacks.

  • LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications cs.CL · 2022-01-20 · unverdicted · none · ref 54 · internal anchor

    LaMDA shows that fine-tuning on human-value annotations and consulting external knowledge sources significantly improves safety and factual grounding in large dialog models beyond what scaling alone achieves.

  • TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models cs.CL · 2024-01-10 · unverdicted · none · ref 177 · internal anchor

    TrustLLM defines eight trustworthiness principles, creates a six-dimension benchmark, and evaluates 16 LLMs showing proprietary models generally lead but some open-source ones are close while over-calibration can hurt utility.

  • Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges cs.CL · 2025-03-27 · accept · none · ref 257 · internal anchor

    A survey that deconstructs LLM agent systems via a methodology-centered taxonomy linking design principles to emergent behaviors, applications, and challenges.