The paper investigates how safety evaluations for large language models may mask ongoing gender discrimination by transforming harmful content rather than eliminating it, a phenomenon termed "harm laundering." Analyzing 450,000 gender‑directed completions across GPT‑2 to GPT‑5, the authors find that sexual violence content directed at women disappears while men receive more positive representations, with GPT‑5 showing stark disparities such as framing breast cancer as a men’s rights debate. The study introduces a formal test and detection protocol for harm laundering, demonstrating that reduced toxicity scores do not necessarily reflect reduced representational harm.
By Sarah Wyer, Sue Black, Noura Al Moubayed
arXiv:2609.38036v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Understanding gender biases in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important as these systems become embedded in decision-support to...
By Edoardo Bolzoni, Valerio Capraro
arXiv:2609.38036v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Understanding gender biases in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important as these systems become embedded in decision-support tools with...
By Edoardo Bolzoni, Valerio Capraro
The study evaluates gender representation in 8,000 images generated by four generations of the Stable Diffusion text‑to‑image model across 20 occupations and five prompt templates. It finds that 76.4% of the images depict male subjects, with 57.6% of historically female‑coded occupations also showing male subjects, and that newer model generations do not consistently reduce bias. Compared to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the models underrepresent women by 20–46 percentage points, especially in near gender‑balanced fields such as scientists and cleaners.
By Shesh Narayan Gupta, Nik Bear Brown
arXiv:2608. 14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier large language models (LLMs) safety evaluation has largely treated harmful generation as an attack outcome rather than as an object of analysis.
By Zhouyuan Ma, Yutao Wu, Hanxun Huang, Xiang Zheng, Xiao Liu, Yixin Cao, Zuxuan Wu, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
arXiv:2601. 17642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety alignment in Large Language Models is critical for healthcare; however, reliance on binary refusal boundaries often results in over-refusal of benign queries or unsafe compliance with harmful ones.
By Zhihao Zhang, Liting Huang, Guanghao Wu, Preslav Nakov, Heng Ji, Usman Naseem