Beyond "I Can't Help With That": How Child Safety Experts Evaluate AI Chatbot Safety
Youth increasingly turn to AI chatbots for social and emotional support, raising concerns about how these systems respond, especially in high-stakes situations. However, existing child safety evaluations of AI lack grounding in real-world harms that youth experience, rely on unvalidated assumptions about what counts as an appropriate output (e.g., refusal), and typically focus on detecting adversarial prompts or surface-level harms in outputs only. Thus, these evaluations can fail to detect responses that pose harm to youth in practice. To better understand the limitations of current evaluation practices, we conducted interviews with 19 practitioners working directly with youth in vulnera...
| Authors | Hannah Cha, Neha Shukla, Solon Barocas et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 8 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
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