Sex-Ed Tutor: A Community-Powered Conversational Agent for LGBTQ+ Youth Sex Education

Abstract

Online LGBTQ+ communities offer rich real-world experiences and associated discussions for LGBTQ+ youth to learn knowledge about sex. However, the content in these communities is usually disorganized and normally requires learners to passively browse it. In this work, based on a formative study with six LGBTQ+ youth, we introduce Sex-Ed Tutor, a conversational agent that leverages user-generated content from LGBTQ+ communities for sex education. Powered by large language models, our Tutor provides LGBTQ+ youth with foundational sex knowledge, interactive discussions on the related cases from the communities, and scenario-based exercises. A within-subjects study (N = 22) indicates that compared to a baseline condition without Sex-Ed Tutor, our Tutor significantly enhances performance in retention and application of learned sex knowledge and provides a more engaging learning experience, with sacrifice on higher cognitive load. We discuss the implications for teaching sex knowledge to LGBTQ+ youth with community data.

keywords: online community， sex education，conversational agent，LGBTQ+ youth