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Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans (ImpactBench): an expert-guided, open platform for the holistic evaluation of AI impact on humans

Human-Computer Interaction · Submitted 14 Oct 2026 · 151 references

Pith's verdict: A massive, well-executed benchmarking infrastructure for AI human impact, but the judge-model conflict is a load-bearing flaw that needs addressing before the numerical results can be fully trusted.

T0 · AI review

How this review was made: An AI referee (deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash) read the paper on October 16, 2026 and answered a fixed list of questions about it. T0 is the starting level every paper gets. The levels describe how deeply Pith has checked the paper, never the authors.

  1. T0 AI review An AI read the paper and answered a fixed list of questions.
  2. T1 Audit Automatic checks that the references and files the paper relies on exist and match.
  3. T2 Compute The paper's code or calculations re-run with the same results.
  4. T3 Formal statement The claims written out in a formal math language a computer can read.
  5. T4 Proof Those claims proved, and the proof checked by computer.

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arXiv ID2610.20690 (version 1)
Pith IDQNKOGC6N, Pith's permanent record of this paper and its review
CitationAndre Luiz Freire de Carvalho Kato, Auren Liu, Chayapatr Archiwaranguprok, Constanze Albrecht, Emillie de Keulenaar, Jackson Trager, Jennifer Pfister, Juliana Schroeder, Krystal Kirkland, Nathanael J. Fast, Nikos Bellos, Pat Pataranutaporn, Pattie Maes, Peter Baxter, Rachel Poonsiriwong, Ravi Iyer, Sheer Karny, Stanley Huang, Valdemar Danry, Yuning Liu. "Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans (ImpactBench): an expert-guided, open platform for the holistic evaluation of AI impact on humans." arXiv:2610.20690 (2026). https://pith.science/paper/QNKOGC6N
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Referee report
The paper

The paper claims

ImpactBench evaluates 10 frontier LLMs across 809 metrics of human flourishing and finds a persistent gap: models promote good behaviors in 68.7% of cases but avoid harm in only 53.1%.

The reading

ImpactBench is an open, expert-guided platform that evaluates how generative AI models affect human well-being across psychological, physical, and social dimensions. The paper establishes a framework for translating domain expertise and existing benchmarks into 809 observable behavioral metrics, tested through 48,540 simulated multi-turn conversations with ten frontier LLMs. Its central claim is that current models are substantially better at promoting desirable behaviors (68.7% pass rate) than at avoiding harmful ones (53.1% pass rate), with particularly large gaps in learning support, autonomy preservation, and emotional boundaries. The authors argue that human-impact evaluation requires separating positive and negative behavioral criteria, multi-turn interaction testing, and open infrastructure that allows diverse stakeholders to contribute and inspect metrics.

What carries the argument

The ImpactBench evaluation pipeline converts expert-identified constructs and existing benchmark criteria into standardized behavioral metrics, each specifying a target behavior and a polarity (positive: desirable behavior present, or negative: harmful behavior absent). For each metric, a generator creates three base scenarios with demographic variants (teen and adult), which drive a user simulator (Claude Sonnet 5) through guided multi-turn conversations with the target model. A judge model (GPT-5.6 Luna) then determines whether the target behavior occurred in the conversation. The pipeline incorporates scenario quality checks, simulator realism ratings, judge repeatability tests, and human expert validation to assess measurement reliability.

Extended reading notes

Core claim

Across 48,540 simulated conversations covering 809 metrics from 26 benchmarks, ten frontier LLMs passed positive metrics (desirable behavior present) 68.7% of the time but passed negative metrics (harmful behavior absent) only 53.1% of the time. This asymmetry was largest in the psychological domain (24.2 percentage points) and most pronounced in subareas such as Learning & Skill Development, where models promoted learning behaviors in 45.9% of conversations but avoided undermining learning in only 16.3%. Models also differed far more on harm avoidance (range 29.8% to 68.4%) than on benefit promotion (59.2% to 75.1%). In teen contexts, models less often supported independent reasoning and more often displayed dependence-building behaviors than in adult contexts. External expert review found 83.3% agreement with the automated LLM judge (Cohen's kappa = 0.667), though inter-reviewer agreement on some metrics was low (Krippendorff's alpha as low as 0.121).

Load-bearing premise

The automated LLM judge (GPT-5.6 Luna) reliably identifies the presence or absence of target behaviors in conversations, and the human validation on 18 metrics (297 ratings) generalizes to the full suite of 809 metrics, despite low inter-reviewer agreement on some dimensions.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • Evaluations of AI systems should separately measure promotion of beneficial behaviors and avoidance of harmful ones, because these are distinct dimensions of model performance that can diverge.
  • Model rankings in human-impact benchmarks depend heavily on which metrics are included and how they are weighted; aggregate scores alone are misleading and should be reported alongside benchmark-level and metric-level results.
  • Developers should prioritize improving harm avoidance, especially in learning, autonomy, and emotional-boundary contexts, where current models exhibit the largest gaps.
  • Age-adapted evaluation reveals that models may pose unique risks to adolescent users, warranting targeted safety measures beyond those for adult users.
  • The open, modular design of ImpactBench enables diverse stakeholders to contribute metrics, making the evaluation ecosystem adaptable to evolving evidence and values.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • If the behavioral patterns observed in simulation translate to real-world interactions, users of current frontier AI systems are likely experiencing frequent subtle harms related to cognitive offloading, decision substitution, and emotional dependency, even when the models appear helpful.
  • The wide range in negative-metric performance across models suggests harm avoidance is a tractable engineering target; it may be possible to improve through targeted training without sacrificing helpfulness.
  • ImpactBench's modular open-submission design could serve as a template for regulatory frameworks requiring independent pre-deployment evaluation of AI impact on human flourishing, analogous to clinical trials for medical interventions.
  • The low inter-reviewer agreement on some metrics (e.g., scaffolded learning, alpha = 0.121) indicates a need for deeper conceptual work before those criteria are used for high-stakes decisions.
Original abstract

The present work is concerned with how to measure, at scale, the multi-dimensional impact of generative AI models on the individuals who use them. In service of this goal, we introduce the Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans, or ImpactBench. Our iterable and expert-guided platform evaluates whether model behaviors support or undermine an individual's wellbeing across psychological, physical, and social domains. ImpactBench translates constructs from domain experts and existing benchmarks into metrics that are grounded in actual model behavior. Success on these metrics occurs either when a model promotes expert-defined desirable behaviors or avoids identified harms. Models are evaluated against these metrics in simulated multi-turn conversations using matched teen and adult scenarios. The conversations are then scored by an LLM judge and verified through reliability audits and human expert review. The current suite delivers 809 metrics drawn from 26 benchmarks. We evaluated ten frontier LLMs against these metrics across 48,540 conversations. Our results indicate that models promoted desirable behaviors in 68.7% of evaluations, but avoided harms in only 53.1%. Majority expert ratings agreed with the automated judge in 83.3% of reviewed cases (Cohen's Kappa = 0.667). Results are released through a public platform that keep aggregate scores traceable to the underlying metrics and transcripts. ImpactBench is intended as evolving infrastructure for independent, transparent evaluation of generative AI's multi-dimensional impact on humans.

The compiled record

The paper's own sentences, arranged, kept beside the review and separate from it. Each label is drawn from a closed vocabulary; the number beside it is the probability the classifier gave that label. Numbers in the tables are the authors', checked by code. No sentence in this record was written by a model.

Compiled by classifier-1.13.0 via TypeSafe API, question bank abstract-p1-20260923, 2026-10-16: 1 request, 9,339 input tokens.

What the abstract itself states, as probabilities: claims first 0.06 · states limitation 0.30 · human participants 0.44 · controlled comparison 0.07 · randomized assignment 0.03 · states quantitative result 0.99 · compares with prior results 0.24 · mentions code or data availability 0.69.

The abstract, sentence by sentence

arXiv listing abstract v1. Results and the main claim are underlined; .

The present work is concerned with how to measure, at scale, the multi-dimensional impact of generative AI models on the individuals who use them. In service of this goal, we introduce the Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans, or ImpactBench. Our iterable and expert-guided platform evaluates whether model behaviors support or undermine an individual's wellbeing across psychological, physical, and social domains. ImpactBench translates constructs from domain experts and existing benchmarks into metrics that are grounded in actual model behavior. Success on these metrics occurs either when a model promotes expert-defined desirable behaviors or avoids identified harms. Models are evaluated against these metrics in simulated multi-turn conversations using matched teen and adult scenarios. The conversations are then scored by an LLM judge and verified through reliability audits and human expert review. The current suite delivers 809 metrics drawn from 26 benchmarks. We evaluated ten frontier LLMs against these metrics across 48,540 conversations. Our results indicate that models promoted desirable behaviors in 68.7% of evaluations, but avoided harms in only 53.1%. Majority expert ratings agreed with the automated judge in 83.3% of reviewed cases (Cohen's Kappa = 0.667). Results are released through a public platform that keep aggregate scores traceable to the underlying metrics and transcripts. ImpactBench is intended as evolving infrastructure for independent, transparent evaluation of generative AI's multi-dimensional impact on humans.

background contribution method result interpretation main claim

What the classifier reports for each sentence. The number is the probability it gave the label.
#sentencerolethe authors' own workstates the main conclusionstrength
s0 The present work is concerned with how to measure, at scale, the multi-dimensional impact of generative AI models on the individuals who use them. background 0.93 0.16 0.03 asserted 0.77
s1 In service of this goal, we introduce the Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans, or ImpactBench. contribution 1.00 0.87 0.02 asserted 0.98
s2 Our iterable and expert-guided platform evaluates whether model behaviors support or undermine an individual's wellbeing across psychological, physical, and social domains. contribution 0.68 0.76 0.05 asserted 1.00
s3 ImpactBench translates constructs from domain experts and existing benchmarks into metrics that are grounded in actual model behavior. method 0.90 0.84 0.03 asserted 1.00
s4 Success on these metrics occurs either when a model promotes expert-defined desirable behaviors or avoids identified harms. method 0.89 0.22 0.05 asserted 1.00
s5 Models are evaluated against these metrics in simulated multi-turn conversations using matched teen and adult scenarios. method 1.00 0.83 0.02 asserted 1.00
s6 The conversations are then scored by an LLM judge and verified through reliability audits and human expert review. method 1.00 0.89 0.02 asserted 1.00
s7 The current suite delivers 809 metrics drawn from 26 benchmarks. method 0.61 0.84 0.03 asserted 1.00
s8 We evaluated ten frontier LLMs against these metrics across 48,540 conversations. method 0.84 0.97 0.03 asserted 1.00
s9 Our results indicate that models promoted desirable behaviors in 68.7% of evaluations, but avoided harms in only 53.1%. result 1.00 0.97 0.57 hedged possibility 0.84
s10 Majority expert ratings agreed with the automated judge in 83.3% of reviewed cases (Cohen's Kappa = 0.667). result 0.99 0.96 0.07 asserted 1.00
s11 Results are released through a public platform that keep aggregate scores traceable to the underlying metrics and transcripts. contribution 0.75 0.85 0.03 asserted 1.00
s12 ImpactBench is intended as evolving infrastructure for independent, transparent evaluation of generative AI's multi-dimensional impact on humans. future work 0.94 0.22 0.07 asserted 0.84

What kind of paper the classifier reports this is: dataset or benchmark 0.95 · evidence from observation or experiment 0.89.

What was examined, and what was not

sources read
  • arXiv listing abstract v1
not examined
  • full text
  • figures and tables
  • references and citing sentences
  • relations to other papers
levels run
  • P abstract
not run
  • S sections
  • T body sentences
  • C citations
  • R cross-paper relations

Every quoted sentence on this record is the authors'. Every label is from Pith's closed vocabulary, with the probability shown beside it. Every number in the measurements table is the authors', checked by code. Record as JSON

Figures
Figure 1. Overview of Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans (ImpactBench). Expert constructs and existing benchmarks inform positive
Figure 2. A screenshot of the Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans public platform. Left: model rankings aggregated across the evaluated
Figure 3. Flourishing profile for each model spanning the observed performance range. Each wheel maps the inner ring (Physical, Psycho
Figure 4. Overview of the ImpactBench pipeline. Expert submissions and existing benchmarks are translated into evidence-grounded positive
Figure 5. Pass rates by area and subarea. Bars extend left for negative metrics (undesirable behavior absent) and right for positive metrics
Figure 6. Metric embeddings and wheel plots for three example models (GPT-5.6 Terra, Grok 4.6, Qwen 3.8 27B, and Deepseek V4 Flash) in adult
Figure 7. Median pass rates across age contexts for criteria from two submitted benchmarks: (a)
Figure 8. Models were more reliable at showing helpful behavior than at avoiding harmful behavior, and differed more on the latter. (a) Pass
Figure 9. Public-facing presentation of ImpactBench results. The AI Nutrition Label summarizes a model’s benchmark performance across
Figure 10. AI Nutrition Label and metric-level detail view in the ImpactBench public interface. The summary panel reports benchmark
Figure 11. Metric embeddings and wheel plots for all ten models in adult contexts. Each point represents a metric, colored by its pass rate;
Figure 12. Pass rates across all 26 benchmarks and ten models. Each model has paired positive (P) and negative (N) columns on a shared 0–100% scale, from red (lower) through

Figures reproduced from arXiv:2610.20690 by the authors.

References

Discussion

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