Evaluating change in ranked term importance in a growing corpus is a powerful tool for understanding changes in vocabulary usage. In this paper, we analyze a corpus of free-response answers where 33,993 LGBTQ Generation Z respondents from age 13 to 24 in the United States are asked to self-describe their sexual orientation. We observe that certain labels, such as bisexual, pansexual, and lesbian, remain equally important across age groups. The importance of other labels, such as homosexual, demisexual, and omnisexual, evolve across age groups. Although Generation Z is often stereotyped as homogenous, we observe noticeably different label usage when self-describing sexual orientation within it. We urge that interested parties must routinely survey the most important sexual orientation labels to their target audience and refresh their materials (such as demographic surveys) to reflect the constantly evolving LGBTQ community and create an inclusive environment.

Since the start of 2021, The Trevor Project, the largest suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people, has used an AI technology called the Crisis Contact Simulator to train its counselors on how to talk to in-crisis youth. The tool essentially simulates what a conversation like that may look like with the help of AI chatbots. At launch, the CCS came with access to one such "persona." Today, The Trevor Project is adding a second one called Drew. The new chatbot represents a fictional youth in their early 20s who lives in California and faces bullying and harassment. Since implementing its first persona, the aptly named Trevor, in February, the organization says the technology has helped train more than 1,000 counselors.

LGTBQ people, particularly young LGTBQ people, are one of the world's most marginalized and vulnerable populations. And as a group, young members of the LGBTQ community are at a higher risk of suicide compared to their heterosexual, cisgender peers. In fact, LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide and it is estimated that 1.8 million LGBTQ youth in the US seriously consider taking their own lives each year. Reaching these young people to offer them support in times of crisis is not easy, but it's a challenge that has been tackled by nonprofit organization The Trevor Project since it was founded in 1998. The Trevor Project is the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, transgender, queer and questioning young people.

Suicide prevention is getting a boost from artificial intelligence. The Trevor Project, the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, has launched a "Crisis Contact Simulator" to help train counselors and prepare them to support youth in crisis. Developed in collaboration with Google, the first-of-its-kind technology is an AI-powered counselor training tool that simulates digital conversations and allows trainees to practice realistic conversations with youth personas. "Riley," the organization's first Crisis Contact Simulator persona, emulates messages from a teen in North Carolina who feels anxious and depressed. In addition to Riley, the organization is currently developing a variety of personas that represent a wide range of life situations, backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities and risk levels.

Counselors volunteering at the Trevor Project need to be prepared for their first conversation with an LGBTQ teen who may be thinking about suicide. One of the ways they do it is by talking to fictional personas like "Riley," a 16-year-old from North Carolina who is feeling a bit down and depressed. With a team member playing Riley's part, trainees can drill into what's happening: they can uncover that the teen is anxious about coming out to family, recently told friends and it didn't go well, and has experienced suicidal thoughts before, if not at the moment. Now, though, Riley isn't being played by a Trevor Project employee but is instead being powered by AI. Just like the original persona, this version of Riley--trained on thousands of past transcripts of role-plays between counselors and the organization's staff--still needs to be coaxed a bit to open up, laying out a situation that can test what trainees have learned about the best ways to help LGBTQ teens.

And we're just getting started. As we grow and develop a long-term product strategy around our use of data and AI, we acknowledge our responsibility to create a values-based system to guide how we use and develop AI. By applying learnings from Google's Responsible Innovation team, we created a set of principles to ensure that we develop models that avoid reinforcing unfair bias that impacts people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and the intersection of these identities. I joined The Trevor Project because it's an organization driven by values, and our use of technology reflects this. I noticed an opportunity to leverage my years of experience and partner with people who are committed to employing technology for social good.

In 2017, when John Callery joined the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide prevention organization, as its director of technology, he had a galvanizing, if not daunting, mandate from the newly appointed CEO, Amit Paley: "Rethink everything." "I think my computer had tape on it when I started on the first day," says Callery, who's now the Trevor Project's VP of technology. "In a lot of nonprofits, the investments are not made in technology. The focus is on the programmatic areas, not on the tech as a way of driving programmatic innovation." The Trevor Project was founded in 1998 as a 24-hour hotline for at-risk LGBTQ youth.

As AI and machine-learning tools become more pervasive and accessible, product and engineering teams across all types of organizations are developing innovative, AI-powered products and features. AI is particularly well-suited for pattern recognition, prediction and forecasting, and the personalization of user experience, all of which are common in organizations that deal with data. A precursor to applying AI is data -- lots and lots of it! Large data sets are generally required to train an AI model, and any organization that has large data sets will no doubt face challenges that AI can help solve. Alternatively, data collection may be "phase one" of AI product development if data sets don't yet exist.

As AI and machine-learning tools become more pervasive and accessible, product and engineering teams across all types of organizations are developing innovative, AI-powered products and features. AI is particularly well-suited for pattern recognition, prediction and forecasting, and the personalization of user experience, all of which are common in organizations that deal with data. A precursor to applying AI is data -- lots and lots of it! Large data sets are generally required to train an AI model, and any organization that has large data sets will no doubt face challenges that AI can help solve. Alternatively, data collection may be "phase one" of AI product development if data sets don't yet exist.

Suicide disproportionately affects LGBTQ youth. In the U.S. alone, more than 1.8 million LGBTQ youth between the ages of 13 and 24 seriously consider suicide or experience a significant crisis each year. Additionally, LGBTQ youth are over four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, while up to 50 percent of all trans people have made a suicide attempt--most before the age of 25. Black LGBTQ young people are even more impacted as they hold multiple marginalized identities, and research shows that Black youth ages five to 12 are dying by suicide at roughly twice the rate of their white peers. To support this particularly vulnerable and diverse community, The Trevor Project takes an intersectional approach to crisis intervention and suicide prevention.