Due to the subtleness, implicity, and different possible interpretations
perceived by different people, detecting undesirable content from text is a
nuanced difficulty. It is a long-known risk that language models (LMs), once
trained on corpus containing undesirable content, have the power to manifest
biases and toxicity. However, recent studies imply that, as a remedy, LMs are
also capable of identifying toxic content without additional fine-tuning.
Prompt-methods have been shown to effectively harvest this surprising
self-diagnosing capability. However, existing prompt-based methods usually
specify an instruction to a language model in a discriminative way. In this
work, we explore the generative variant of zero-shot prompt-based toxicity
detection with comprehensive trials on prompt engineering. We evaluate on three
datasets with toxicity labels annotated on social media posts. Our analysis
highlights the strengths of our generative classification approach both
quantitatively and qualitatively. Interesting aspects of self-diagnosis and its
ethical implications are discussed.