5 Responsible usage

Evaluating risks in a langauge model is challenging (Jacobs & Wallach, 2021; Weidinger et al., 2021) because of
their general-purpose capabilities and the many potential downstream uses. Like other software systems, language
models are created within complex sociotechnical systems, spanning the people creating it, the people using it to build
applications, and the people using those applications. Risks exist for harms at the individual level, community level,
and societal level. System failures and potential harms impact different people differently; vulnerable groups may
experience cumulative impact over time, in ways that vary across global sociocultural contexts (Shelby et al., 2023). We
use a ﬁve-step approach to evaluation, outlined with detailed evaluation results in Appendix E.
PaLM 2 Technical Report