Culturally Aware GenAI Risks for Youth: Perspectives from Youth, Parents, and Teachers in a Non-Western Context

The rise of generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted urgent debates surrounding academic integrity and ethical use. This study examines cross-cultural differences in student perceptions of GenAI use, comparing responses from students at Canadian and South Korean universities. Using a scenario-based survey administered in Fall 2024, we analyzed how students judged the ethicality and rule compliance of AI-assisted coding practices. Results reveal that Canadian students were consistently more likely to perceive the use of GenAI as both unethical and against institutional policies compared to Korean students, despite functionally identical institutional policies. Statistical analysis, including Mann-Whitney U tests and correlation coefficients, demonstrated significant differences across nearly all scenarios. Analysis of the factors used in generating scenarios indicated that the amount of AI-generated code incorporated into assignments most strongly influenced ethical judgments. Findings were interpreted through Hofstede's cultural dimensions framework, suggesting that cultural factors such as power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance significantly shape students' ethical reasoning regarding GenAI. Our results contribute to the growing body of evidence emphasizing that equitable AI integration in education must be culturally responsive, taking into account diverse conceptions of academic integrity. We advocate for the development of nuanced AI-use guidelines that are sensitive to local cultural contexts while upholding fundamental principles of academic honesty. This study highlights the need for ongoing cross-cultural research to inform ethical AI policies and support responsible GenAI use in global higher education settings.

Youth increasingly turn to AI chatbots for social and emotional support, raising concerns about how these systems respond, especially in high-stakes situations. However, existing child safety evaluations of AI lack grounding in real-world harms that youth experience, rely on unvalidated assumptions about what counts as an appropriate output (e.g., refusal), and typically focus on detecting adversarial prompts or surface-level harms in outputs only. Thus, these evaluations can fail to detect responses that pose harm to youth in practice. To better understand the limitations of current evaluation practices, we conducted interviews with 19 practitioners working directly with youth in vulnerable situations, including social workers, therapists, and psychologists, asking them to reflect on chatbots' responses to risky situations commonly faced by youth, as established in prior empirical work. Practitioners identified chatbot behaviors likely to cause harm as well as those that could meaningfully support youth in difficult moments, discussed the role that chatbots should (and should not) play in these interactions, and offered concrete recommendations for improving chatbot responses. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for AI child safety evaluation and infrastructure, and highlight the need for incorporating practitioners' perspectives into safety work.

Safe global deployment of AI models requires alignment with human values that vary across cultures. Yet rater pools in safety evaluation datasets remain largely geographically homogeneous, failing to capture geo-cultural differences. Further, it remains unclear whether such differences persist after controlling for demographics such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Through a meta-analysis of safety datasets, we find that most do not report geo-cultural information, and those that do lack a unified methodology to jointly analyze geo-cultural and demographic correlates. Using the Inglehart-Welzel dimensions of cross-cultural variation, we demonstrate via multilevel modeling that cultural zone membership explains variance in safety ratings beyond standard demographics (p<0.05 across 6 datasets). Moreover, our analysis indicates that roughly 10% of items in the datasets we examined are culturally sensitive: likely to be misclassified as safe without adequate cultural representation. We evaluate LLMs as both rater surrogates and triage tools, finding that current LLMs do not reliably stand in for raters, though they can help prioritize culturally sensitive items for human annotation. Our findings motivate more culturally pluralistic safety evaluation and offer practical takeaways to support it.