“Digital Friend” or “It”? Conceptualizations of <scp>LLM</scp> ‐Powered Chatbots in National Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence Crisis Hotlines

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the use of chatbots among US‐based, national sexual assault and domestic violence hotlines, and examines how these chatbots are conceptualized. Because chatbots are indifferent to their outputs but survivors in crisis/danger require trauma‐informed, empathetic support, it is important to understand how hotlines conceptualize their chatbots and present them to survivors. Through qualitative content analysis of supporting documentation about the chatbots, this project found that the hotlines describe similar purposes of the chatbots and state the chatbots are not replacements for live services. However, the hotlines diverge in how they refer to the chatbots (“it” vs. “she” / “digital friend”) and in what features the chatbot offers. The use of “she” and “digital friend,” and the knowledge and skills required by some purported features of the chatbots blur the line between the chatbot being a simple, information retrieval tool and human‐like enough to replace trained, live support.