Efficacy of Utilizing Large Language Models to Detect Public Threat Posted Online
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the efficacy of utilizing large language models (LLMs) to detect public threats posted online. Amid rising concerns over the spread of threatening rhetoric and advance notices of violence, automated content analysis techniques may aid in early identification and moderation. Custom data collection tools were developed to amass post titles from a popular Korean online community, comprising 500 non-threat examples and 20 threats. Various LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM) were prompted to classify individual posts as either "threat" or "safe." Statistical analysis found all models demonstrated strong accuracy, passing chi-square goodness of fit tests for both threat and non-threat identification. GPT-4 performed best overall with 97.9% non-threat and 100% threat accuracy. Affordability analysis also showed PaLM API pricing as highly cost-efficient. The findings indicate LLMs can effectively augment human content moderation at scale to help mitigate emerging online risks. However, biases, transparency, and ethical oversight remain vital considerations before real-world implementation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".