MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 33.01.01

Harmful or inappropriate content

Category: Ethical Concerns

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Description

"Harmful or inappropriate content produced by generative AI includes but is not limited to violent content, the use of offensive language, discriminative content, and pornography. Although OpenAI has set up a content policy for ChatGPT, harmful or inappropriate content can still appear due to reasons such as algorithmic limitations or jailbreaking (i.e., removal of restrictions imposed). The language models’ ability to understand or generate harmful or offensive content is referred to as toxicity (Zhuo et al., 2023). Toxicity can bring harm to society and damage the harmony of the community. H

From Generative AI and ChatGPT: Applications, Challenges, and AI-Human Collaboration (Nah2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 1. Discrimination & Toxicity
Subdomain: 1.2 Exposure to toxic content
Causal entity: AI
Intent: Other
Timing: Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: AI exposing users to harmful, abusive, unsafe or inappropriate content. May involve AI creating, describing, providing advice, or encouraging action. Examples of toxic content include hate-speech, violence, extremism, illegal acts, child sexual abuse material, as well as content that violates community norms such as profanity, inflammatory political speech, or pornography.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

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How other frameworks describe this risk

Harmful Content
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Toxicity
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Toxic Training Data
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts
Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)
Controversial Opinions
Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)
Toxicity and Abusive Content
Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)
Harmful responses
Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)
Violation of social norms
The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Other entries from Nah2023

Ethical Concerns Risk Category
Bias Risk Sub-Category · 1.1
Over-reliance Risk Sub-Category · 5.2
Misuse Risk Sub-Category · 4.3
Privacy and security Risk Sub-Category · 2.1
Digital divide Risk Sub-Category · 6.1
Technology concerns Risk Category · 7.3
Hallucination Risk Sub-Category · 3.1
Quality of training data Risk Sub-Category · 7.3
Explainability Risk Sub-Category · 7.4
Authenticity Risk Sub-Category · 6.3
Prompt engineering Risk Sub-Category · 7.4