The Illusion of Competence: Evaluating the Effect of Explanations on Users' Mental Models of Visual Question Answering Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sieker, Judith, Junker, Simeon, Utescher, Ronja, Attari, Nazia, Wersing, Heiko, Buschmeier, Hendrik, Zarrieß, Sina
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Sieker, Judith
Junker, Simeon
Utescher, Ronja
Attari, Nazia
Wersing, Heiko
Buschmeier, Hendrik
Zarrieß, Sina
author_facet Sieker, Judith
Junker, Simeon
Utescher, Ronja
Attari, Nazia
Wersing, Heiko
Buschmeier, Hendrik
Zarrieß, Sina
contents We examine how users perceive the limitations of an AI system when it encounters a task that it cannot perform perfectly and whether providing explanations alongside its answers aids users in constructing an appropriate mental model of the system's capabilities and limitations. We employ a visual question answer and explanation task where we control the AI system's limitations by manipulating the visual inputs: during inference, the system either processes full-color or grayscale images. Our goal is to determine whether participants can perceive the limitations of the system. We hypothesize that explanations will make limited AI capabilities more transparent to users. However, our results show that explanations do not have this effect. Instead of allowing users to more accurately assess the limitations of the AI system, explanations generally increase users' perceptions of the system's competence - regardless of its actual performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_19170
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Illusion of Competence: Evaluating the Effect of Explanations on Users' Mental Models of Visual Question Answering Systems
Sieker, Judith
Junker, Simeon
Utescher, Ronja
Attari, Nazia
Wersing, Heiko
Buschmeier, Hendrik
Zarrieß, Sina
Computation and Language
We examine how users perceive the limitations of an AI system when it encounters a task that it cannot perform perfectly and whether providing explanations alongside its answers aids users in constructing an appropriate mental model of the system's capabilities and limitations. We employ a visual question answer and explanation task where we control the AI system's limitations by manipulating the visual inputs: during inference, the system either processes full-color or grayscale images. Our goal is to determine whether participants can perceive the limitations of the system. We hypothesize that explanations will make limited AI capabilities more transparent to users. However, our results show that explanations do not have this effect. Instead of allowing users to more accurately assess the limitations of the AI system, explanations generally increase users' perceptions of the system's competence - regardless of its actual performance.
title The Illusion of Competence: Evaluating the Effect of Explanations on Users' Mental Models of Visual Question Answering Systems
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19170