  An increasingly prevalent problem for intelligent technologies is text
safety, as uncontrolled systems may generate recommendations to their users
that lead to injury or life-threatening consequences. However, the degree of
explicitness of a generated statement that can cause physical harm varies. In
this paper, we distinguish types of text that can lead to physical harm and
establish one particularly underexplored category: covertly unsafe text. Then,
we further break down this category with respect to the system's information
and discuss solutions to mitigate the generation of text in each of these
subcategories. Ultimately, our work defines the problem of covertly unsafe
language that causes physical harm and argues that this subtle yet dangerous
issue needs to be prioritized by stakeholders and regulators. We highlight
mitigation strategies to inspire future researchers to tackle this challenging
problem and help improve safety within smart systems.
