Generative AI systems may pose serious risks to individuals vulnerable to eating disorders. Existing safeguards tend to overlook subtle but clinically significant cues, leaving many risks unaddressed. To better understand the nature of these risks, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 clinicians, researchers, and advocates with expertise in eating disorders. Using abductive qualitative analysis, we developed an expert-guided taxonomy of generative AI risks across seven categories: (1) providing generalized health advice; (2) encouraging disordered behaviors; (3) supporting symptom concealment; (4) creating thinspiration; (5) reinforcing negative self-beliefs; (6) promoting excessive focus on the body; and (7) perpetuating narrow views about eating disorders. Our results demonstrate how certain user interactions with generative AI systems intersect with clinical features of eating disorders in ways that may intensify risk. We discuss implications of our work, including approaches for risk assessment, safeguard design, and participatory evaluation practices with domain experts.

This paper describes the participation of the SINAI team in the eRisk@CLEF lab. Specifically, two of the proposed tasks have been addressed: i) Task 1 on the early detection of signs of pathological gambling, and ii) Task 3 on measuring the severity of the signs of eating disorders. The approach presented in Task 1 is based on the use of sentence embeddings from Transformers with features related to volumetry, lexical diversity, complexity metrics, and emotion-related scores, while the approach for Task 3 is based on text similarity estimation using contextualized word embeddings from Transformers. In Task 1, our team has been ranked in second position, with an F1 score of 0.808, out of 41 participant submissions. In Task 3, our team also placed second out of a total of 3 participating teams.

Eating disorders are complex mental health conditions that affect millions of people around the world. Effective interventions on social media platforms are crucial, yet testing strategies in situ can be risky. We present a novel LLM-driven experimental testbed for simulating and assessing intervention strategies in ED-related discussions. Our framework generates synthetic conversations across multiple platforms, models, and ED-related topics, allowing for controlled experimentation with diverse intervention approaches. We analyze the impact of various intervention strategies on conversation dynamics across four dimensions: intervention type, generative model, social media platform, and ED-related community/topic. We employ cognitive domain analysis metrics, including sentiment, emotions, etc., to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. Our findings reveal that civility-focused interventions consistently improve positive sentiment and emotional tone across all dimensions, while insight-resetting approaches tend to increase negative emotions. We also uncover significant biases in LLM-generated conversations, with cognitive metrics varying notably between models (Claude-3 Haiku $>$ Mistral $>$ GPT-3.5-turbo $>$ LLaMA3) and even between versions of the same model. These variations highlight the importance of model selection in simulating realistic discussions related to ED. Our work provides valuable information on the complex dynamics of ED-related discussions and the effectiveness of various intervention strategies.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in representing individuals and communities, offering new ways to study complex social dynamics. However, effectively aligning LLMs with specific human groups and systematically assessing the fidelity of the alignment remains a challenge. This paper presents a robust framework for aligning LLMs with online communities via instruction-tuning and comprehensively evaluating alignment across various aspects of language, including authenticity, emotional tone, toxicity, and harm. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by applying it to online communities centered on dieting and body image. We administer an eating disorder psychometric test to the aligned LLMs to reveal unhealthy beliefs and successfully differentiate communities with varying levels of eating disorder risk. Our results highlight the potential of LLMs in automated moderation and broader applications in public health and social science research.

The Covid-19 pandemic induced a vast increase in adolescents diagnosed with eating disorders and hospitalized due to eating disorders. This immense growth stemmed partially from the stress of the pandemic but also from increased exposure to content that promotes eating disorders via social media, which, within the last decade, has become plagued by pro-eating disorder content. This study aimed to create a deep learning model capable of determining whether a given social media post promotes eating disorders based solely on image data. Tweets from hashtags that have been documented to promote eating disorders along with Tweets from unrelated hashtags were collected. After prepossessing, these images were labeled as either pro-eating disorder or not based on which Twitter hashtag they were scraped from. Several deep-learning models were trained on the scraped dataset and were evaluated based on their accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall. Ultimately, the Vision Transformer model was determined to be the most accurate, attaining an F1 score of 0.877 and an accuracy of 86.7% on the test set. The model, which was applied to unlabeled Twitter image data scraped from "#selfie", uncovered seasonal fluctuations in the relative abundance of pro-eating disorder content, which reached its peak in the summertime. These fluctuations correspond not only to the seasons, but also to stressors, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Moreover, the Twitter image data indicated that the relative amount of pro-eating disorder content has been steadily rising over the last five years and is likely to continue increasing in the future.

US researchers have developed a chatbot that may help reduce the likelihood a person develops an eating disorder. The bot helped women at a high risk for an eating disorder to reduce their concern over body weight and shape - a factor that contributes to their risk, The Verge reported. According to Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, Assistant Professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, digital prevention programmes could be more effective when guided by a human moderator. The team developed a chatbot that offered "some aspects of moderation in an automated format", Fitzsimmons-Craft was quoted as saying. Participants in the study could use the chatbot through texts or through Facebook Messenger.

I grew up surrounded by technology because my dad was a long-time computer programmer and made sure to bring his daughter into a world of science. With O'Reilly books scattered about the house in colorful arrays, each featuring an animal on the cover, it was not hard for my interest to be piqued in computer science and technology from a young age. It wasn't long before I was opening hard drives - even beloved video game consoles - and fiddling with circuit boards and metal scraps with my dad to understand more about how they worked. During college vacations, I'm still working with my dad on building portable consoles and controllers out of recycled, "dead" generations of video games.