Hide or Highlight: Understanding the Impact of Factuality Expression on User Trust

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Do, Hyo Jin, Geyer, Werner
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Do, Hyo Jin
Geyer, Werner
author_facet Do, Hyo Jin
Geyer, Werner
contents Large language models are known to produce outputs that are plausible but factually incorrect. To prevent people from making erroneous decisions by blindly trusting AI, researchers have explored various ways of communicating factuality estimates in AI-generated outputs to end-users. However, little is known about whether revealing content estimated to be factually incorrect influences users' trust when compared to hiding it altogether. We tested four different ways of disclosing an AI-generated output with factuality assessments: transparent (highlights less factual content), attention (highlights factual content), opaque (removes less factual content), ambiguity (makes less factual content vague), and compared them with a baseline response without factuality information. We conducted a human subjects research (N = 148) using the strategies in question-answering scenarios. We found that the opaque and ambiguity strategies led to higher trust while maintaining perceived answer quality, compared to the other strategies. We discuss the efficacy of hiding presumably less factual content to build end-user trust.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_07095
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hide or Highlight: Understanding the Impact of Factuality Expression on User Trust
Do, Hyo Jin
Geyer, Werner
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models are known to produce outputs that are plausible but factually incorrect. To prevent people from making erroneous decisions by blindly trusting AI, researchers have explored various ways of communicating factuality estimates in AI-generated outputs to end-users. However, little is known about whether revealing content estimated to be factually incorrect influences users' trust when compared to hiding it altogether. We tested four different ways of disclosing an AI-generated output with factuality assessments: transparent (highlights less factual content), attention (highlights factual content), opaque (removes less factual content), ambiguity (makes less factual content vague), and compared them with a baseline response without factuality information. We conducted a human subjects research (N = 148) using the strategies in question-answering scenarios. We found that the opaque and ambiguity strategies led to higher trust while maintaining perceived answer quality, compared to the other strategies. We discuss the efficacy of hiding presumably less factual content to build end-user trust.
title Hide or Highlight: Understanding the Impact of Factuality Expression on User Trust
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07095