‘I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that’: Moral regulation in refusals by LLM chatbots
Published online on August 25, 2025
Abstract
New Media & Society, Volume 28, Issue 8, Page 4047-4071, August 2026.
This article explores how Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots regulate moral values when they refuse ‘unsafe’ requests from users. It applies corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how the chatbots employ tenor resources ofpositioning,tuning, and...
This article explores how Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots regulate moral values when they refuse ‘unsafe’ requests from users. It applies corpus-based discourse analysis to examine how the chatbots employ tenor resources ofpositioning,tuning, and...