Intersectionality in Conversational AI Safety: How Bayesian Multilevel Models Help Understand Diverse Perceptions of Safety

Conversational AI systems exhibit a level of human-like behavior that promises to have profound impacts on many aspects of daily life -- how people access information, create content, and seek social support. Yet these models have also shown a propensity for biases, offensive language, and conveying false information. Consequently, understanding and moderating safety risks in these models is a critical technical and social challenge. Perception of safety is intrinsically subjective, where many factors -- often intersecting -- could determine why one person may consider a conversation with a chatbot safe and another person could consider the same conversation unsafe. In this work, we focus on demographic factors that could influence such diverse perceptions. To this end, we contribute an analysis using Bayesian multilevel modeling to explore the connection between rater demographics and how raters report safety of conversational AI systems. We study a sample of 252 human raters stratified by gender, age group, race/ethnicity group, and locale. This rater pool provided safety labels for 1,340 human-chatbot conversations. Our results show that intersectional effects involving demographic characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and age, as well as content characteristics, such as degree of harm, all play significant roles in determining the safety of conversational AI systems. For example, race/ethnicity and gender show strong intersectional effects, particularly among South Asian and East Asian women. We also find that conversational degree of harm impacts raters of all race/ethnicity groups, but that Indigenous and South Asian raters are particularly sensitive to this harm. Finally, we observe the effect of education is uniquely intersectional for Indigenous raters, highlighting the utility of multilevel frameworks for uncovering underrepresented social perspectives.