Move Fast and Mend Things: Keeping Up with Evolving AI Harms Using Social Media Commentary
Abstract
The rapid deployment of AI systems has created socio-technical, psychological, and operational harms that can elude ex-ante threat modelling and ex-post incident tracking. We introduce an LLM-assisted thematic analysis pipeline to dynamically detect, categorise, and track emerging AI harms from large-scale social media data. Applying it to 5.7 million Reddit post summaries over 18 months (01/2025 to 06/2026), we curate and release a dataset of 575,000 AI harm-related posts and a bottom-up AI harm taxonomy of 12 categories and 47 subnodes. The taxonomy reliably covers established expert-defined risks while surfacing granular harms that top-down frameworks overlook, such as distinct forms of AI privacy violations. Temporal analysis surfaces evolving user-centric harms, such as agentic privacy and security breaches, premature AI adoption in the workplace, and grief from AI companion discontinuation. Our pipeline shortens harm-detection timelines and hereby complements efforts towards more participatory and responsive AI governance.
