A third of US AI chatters are hot at bots, hurling insults at LLMs
Men used a third more swear words than women did (22.0 per 10,000 words compared to 16.5), according to the survey, and age also influenced chatbot abuse, with people aged 35 to 44 outswearing those aged 18 to 24 (21.7 per 10,000 words compared to 13.3).
Key points
- According to Searchable, a company that tracks AI search visibility, 33 percent of US chatbot users swear at or insult their LLMs.
- A Searchable spokesperson told The Register that just over half (52 percent) of abusive messages detected in its survey followed from one of three common frustrations: failing to follow instructions, responding with an incorrect or made-up answer, or misunderstanding the request.
- "Eight percent of abusive messages came straight after the chatbot entirely refused a request or lectured the user with safety guardrails, which is the closest thing we can identify to them trying to steer around those guardrails," we're told.
The repo represented an attempt to implement ideas discussed in a research paper, "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It," that explored how LLMs respond to language about pain in ways that mirror human responses.
Additional details
- Presumably, Anthropic's rules apply to hostile text input or audio input rather than subjecting a vision-enabled model to some obscenity, which could include rude gestures, unlawful sexual imagery, or battlefield carnage.
- But with Anthropic exploring model welfare and wondering aloud whether we should be "concerned about the potential consciousness and experiences of the models themselves," there's a potential (though absurd) argument for physical damage causing trauma to an onboard model.
- Anthropic – which has discretion in how it applies its terms and has said its rules target extreme behavior – did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the frequency of Claude abuse.
- Searchable's survey is based on eight million messages from an opted-in, anonymized US panel that were typed or spoken to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude between September 2025 and September 2026.
- "It should help people get more out of chatbots, and it helps curb the kind of derogatory behavior that previous research suggests can spill over into how people talk to each other." ®.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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