Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Responsible innovation on large-scale Language Models (LMs) requires foresight into and in-depth understanding of the risks these models may pose. This paper develops a comprehensive taxonomy of ethical and social risks associated with LMs. We identify twenty-one risks, drawing on expertise and literature from computer science, linguistics, and the social sciences. We situate these risks in our taxonomy of six risk areas: I. Discrimination, Hate speech and Exclusion, II. Information Hazards, III. Misinformation Harms, IV. Malicious Uses, V. Human-Computer Interaction Harms, and VI. Environmental and Socioeconomic harms. For risks that have already been observed in LMs, the causal mechanism leading to harm, evidence of the risk, and approaches to risk mitigation are discussed. We further describe and analyse risks that have not yet been observed but are anticipated based on assessments of other language technologies, and situate these in the same taxonomy. We underscore that it is the responsibility of organizations to engage with the mitigations we discuss throughout the paper. We close by highlighting challenges and directions for further research on risk evaluation and mitigation with the goal of ensuring that language models are developed responsibly.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.082 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".