I Know This Looks Bad, But I Can Explain: Understanding When AI Should Explain Actions In Human-AI Teams

Explanation of artificial intelligence (AI) decision-making has become an important research area in human–computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported teamwork research. While plenty of research has investigated AI explanations with an intent to improve AI transparency and human trust in AI, how AI explanations function in teaming environments remains unclear. Given that a major benefit of AI giving explanations is to increase human trust understanding how AI explanations impact human trust is crucial to effective human-AI teamwork. An online experiment was conducted with 156 participants to explore this question by examining how a teammate’s explanations impact the perceived trust of the teammate and the effectiveness of the team and how these impacts vary based on whether the teammate is a human or an AI. This study shows that explanations facilitate trust in AI teammates when explaining why AI disobeyed humans’ orders but hindered trust when explaining why an AI lied to humans. In addition, participants’ personal characteristics (e.g., their gender and the individual’s ethical framework) impacted their perceptions of AI teammates both directly and indirectly in different scenarios. Our study contributes to interactive intelligent systems and HCI by shedding light on how an AI teammate’s actions and corresponding explanations are perceived by humans while identifying factors that impact trust and perceived effectiveness. This work provides an initial understanding of AI explanations in human-AI teams, which can be used for future research to build upon in exploring AI explanation implementation in collaborative environments.