Emergency management plans to launch a public preparedness chatbot. Which evaluation should they complete before go-live?

A safety evaluation of the public preparedness chatbot before launch is the evaluation Emergency Management should complete. Public preparedness chat touches high-anxiety topics—evacuations, shelter locations, medical self-care, and rumor control—where harmful, overconfident, discriminatory, or noncompliant outputs can cause real-world harm. Safety evaluation probes jailbreaks, prohibited clinical or legal advice, contradictions of official plans, and crisis-escalation behavior before residents rely on the bot during an activation.

A groundedness evaluation of the public preparedness chatbot before launch checks whether answers stay grounded in official sources, but it does not probe for harmful, overconfident, discriminatory, or noncompliant outputs, so it does not substitute for a pre-launch safety evaluation. A fluency evaluation of the public preparedness chatbot before launch checks grammar, naturalness, and readability, but fluent outputs can still be unsafe, so it does not validate the public preparedness chatbot's safety risks before go-live. A relevance evaluation of the public preparedness chatbot before launch checks whether answers stay on-topic and address the user's query, but it does not test for jailbreaks, prohibited advice, or contradiction of official plans, so it does not substitute for a pre-launch safety evaluation.

Exam caveat: public-facing civic generative applications typically require an explicit safety evaluation before go-live, separate from groundedness, fluency, or relevance checks done before launch. Operational check: complete a documented safety suite covering harmful advice, contradiction of published emergency plans, and prompt injection, with signed-off results, before enabling the preparedness chatbot on public municipal channels.