Even when humans see AI-based assistants purely as tools, they ascribe partial responsibility for decisions to them, as a new study shows.
Future AI-based systems may navigate autonomous vehicles through traffic with no human input. Research has shown that people judge such futuristic AI systems to be just as responsible as humans when they make autonomous traffic decisions. However, real-life AI assistants are far removed from this kind of autonomy. They provide human users with supportive information such as navigation and driving aids. So, who is responsible in these real-life cases when something goes right or wrong? The human user? Or the AI assistant? A team led by Louis Longin from the Chair of Philosophy of Mind has now investigated how people assess responsibility in these cases.
"We all have smart assistants in our pockets," says Longin. "Yet a lot of the experimental evidence we have on responsibility gaps focuses on robots or autonomous vehicles where AI is literally in the driver's seat, deciding for us. Investigating cases where we are still the ones making the final decision, but use AI more like a sophisticated instrument, is essential."
A philosopher specialized in the interaction between humans and AI, Longin, working in collaboration with his colleague Dr. Bahador Bahrami and Prof. Ophelia Deroy, Chair of Philosophy of Mind, investigated how 940 participants judged a human driver using either a smart AI-powered verbal assistant, a smart AI-powered tactile assistant, or a non-AI navigation instrument. Participants also indicated whether they saw the navigation aid as responsible, and to which degree it was a tool.
Ambivalent status of smart assistants
The results reveal an ambivalence: Participants strongly asserted that smart assistants were just tools, yet they saw them as partly responsible for the success or failures of the human drivers who consulted them. No such division of responsibility occurred for the non-AI powered instrument.
No less surprising for the authors was that the smart assistants were also considered more responsible for positive rather than negative outcomes. "People might apply different moral standards for praise and blame. When a crash is averted and no harm ensues, standards are relaxed, making it easier for people to assign credit than blame to non-human systems" suggests Dr. Bahrami, who is an expert on collective responsibility.
Role of language is not relevant
