Safety Guardrails as Domain Modeling Blind Spots

AI safety mechanisms can create systematic gaps in knowledge representation.

When researchers used LLMs to generate ontologies for a fantasy game domain, every AI-generated ontology omitted “Race” entirely, a core game mechanic. The researchers hypothesize the model avoided the term due to content moderation, since “race” is socially sensitive in real-world contexts.

This creates a specific failure mode: legitimate domain concepts that share terminology with sensitive topics get systematically excluded. The AI doesn’t flag the omission or explain it. The gap only becomes visible through comparison with human-generated structures.

For knowledge engineering applications, this means certain domains may have predictable blind spots based on vocabulary overlap with moderated content.

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