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Guardians and Offenders: A Survey on Harmful Content Generation and Safety Mitigation of LLM

Authors: Chi Zhang, Changjia Zhu, Junjie Xiong, Xiaoran Xu, Lingyao Li, Yao Liu, Zhuo Lu

Published: 2025-08-07

arXiv ID: 2508.05775v2

Added to Library: 2025-08-14 23:11 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized content creation across digital platforms, offering unprecedented capabilities in natural language generation and understanding. These models enable beneficial applications such as content generation, question and answering (Q&A), programming, and code reasoning. Meanwhile, they also pose serious risks by inadvertently or intentionally producing toxic, offensive, or biased content. This dual role of LLMs, both as powerful tools for solving real-world problems and as potential sources of harmful language, presents a pressing sociotechnical challenge. In this survey, we systematically review recent studies spanning unintentional toxicity, adversarial jailbreaking attacks, and content moderation techniques. We propose a unified taxonomy of LLM-related harms and defenses, analyze emerging multimodal and LLM-assisted jailbreak strategies, and assess mitigation efforts, including reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), prompt engineering, and safety alignment. Our synthesis highlights the evolving landscape of LLM safety, identifies limitations in current evaluation methodologies, and outlines future research directions to guide the development of robust and ethically aligned language technologies.

🔍 Key Points

  • Systematic review and categorization of harmful content generated by LLMs, providing a comprehensive taxonomy that aids in the development of targeted mitigation strategies.
  • Analysis of unintentional versus intentional harmful content generation, detailing the challenges posed by both and the evolution of adversarial strategies like jailbreaking.
  • Identification of potential uses of LLMs not only as offenders but also as tools for combating harmful content through counter-speech generation, content moderation, and dataset construction for training detection systems.
  • Assessment of limitations in current evaluation methodologies, emphasizing the need for robust testing strategies to safeguard against LLM vulnerabilities.
  • Direction for future research, highlighting the importance of dynamic safety mechanisms and ethical alignment in developing resilient LLMs that adapt to context.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is relevant as it addresses the dual role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in content generation, highlighting their potential for both generating harmful content and mitigating it. By systematically analyzing existing research, developing a unified taxonomy, and proposing future research directives, it provides a vital resource for understanding and enhancing LLM safety in real-world applications.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is of great interest to AI security researchers as it not only outlines the current landscape of harmful content generation by LLMs, but also explores sophisticated methods for attacks, such as adversarial prompts and jailbreaking, that threaten the integrity of these systems. Moreover, the paper's emphasis on effective mitigation strategies and ethical alignment presents crucial insights for developing secure AI technologies and demonstrates the ongoing need for vigilance and innovation in AI safety protocols.

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