Breakdowns in Conversational AI: Interactional Failures in Emotionally and Ethically Sensitive Contexts
Conversational AI is increasingly deployed in emotionally charged and ethically sensitive interactions. Previous research has primarily concentrated on emotional benchmarks or static safety checks, overlooking how alignment unfolds in evolving conversation. We explore the research question: what breakdowns arise when conversational agents confront emotionally and ethically sensitive behaviors, and how do these affect dialogue quality? To stress-test chatbot performance, we develop a persona-conditioned user simulator capable of engaging in multi-turn dialogue with psychological personas and staged emotional pacing. Our analysis reveals that mainstream models exhibit recurrent breakdowns t...
| Authors | Jiawen Deng, Wentao Zhang, Ziyun Jiao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 April 2026 |
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