Trust in AI
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14 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.
Latest papers 103
Trust in clinical artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be reduced to model accuracy, fluency of generation, or overall positive user impression. In medicine, trust must be engineered as a measurable system property grounded in evidence, supervision, and operational boundaries of AI autonomy. This article proposes a practical framework for trustworthy clinical AI built around three principles: evidence, supervision, and staged autonomy. Rather than replacing deterministic clinical logic wholesale with end-to-end black-box models, the proposed approach combines a deterministic core, a patient-specific AI assistant for contextual validation, a multi-tier model escalation mechanism, and a human supervision layer for verification, escalation, and risk control. We demonstrate that trust also depends on selective verification of clinically critical findings, bounded clinical context, disciplined prompt architecture, and careful evaluation on realistic cases. Classifier-driven modular prompting is examined as an incremental path to scaling clinical depth without sacrificing prompt performance and without waiting for complete rule-based coverage. To operationalize trust, a set of trust metrics is proposed, built on metrological principles -- measurement uncertainty, calibration, traceability -- enabling quantitative rather than subjective assessment of each architectural layer. In this perspective, trustworthy clinical AI emerges not as a property of an individual model, but as an architectural outcome of a system into which evidence trails, human oversight, tiered escalation, and graduated action rights are embedded from the outset.
Measuring and Mitigating Persona Distortions from AI Writing Assistance
Hundreds of millions of people use artificial intelligence (AI) for writing assistance. Here, we evaluated how AI writing assistance distorts writer personas - their perceived beliefs, personality, and identity. In three large-scale experiments, writers (N=2,939) wrote political opinion paragraphs with and without AI assistance. Separate groups of readers (N=11,091) blindly evaluated these paragraphs across 29 socially salient dimensions of reader perception, spanning political opinion, writing quality, writer personality, emotions, and demographics. AI writing assistance produced persona distortions across all dimensions: with AI, writers seemed more opinionated, competent, and positive, and their perceived demographic profile shifted towards more privileged groups. Writers objected to many of the observed distortions, yet continued to prefer AI-assisted text even when made aware of them. We successfully mitigated objectionable persona distortions at the model level by training reward models on our experimental data (10,008 paragraphs, 2,903,596 ratings) to steer AI outputs towards faithful representation of writer stance. However, this came at a cost to user acceptance, suggesting an entanglement between desirable and undesirable properties of AI writing assistance that may be difficult to resolve. In two follow-up studies (N=8,798), readers placed substantially more trust in AI-assisted writers and were more persuaded by AI writing when AI was more distortive. Together, our findings demonstrate that persona distortions from AI writing assistance are pervasive and persistent even under realistic conditions of human oversight, and that they are likely to have consequential effects on human behaviours and attitudes, which carries implications for public discourse, trust, and democratic deliberation that scale with AI adoption.
Aligning Human-AI-Interaction Trust for Mental Health Support: Survey and Position for Multi-Stakeholders
Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.
When Can We Trust Deep Neural Networks? Towards Reliable Industrial Deployment with an Interpretability Guide
The deployment of AI systems in safety-critical domains, such as industrial defect inspection, autonomous driving, and medical diagnosis, is severely hampered by their lack of reliability. A single undetected erroneous prediction can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, there is often no alternative but to place trust in the outputs of a trained AI system, which operates without an internal safeguard to flag unreliable predictions, even in cases of high accuracy. We propose a post-hoc explanation-based indicator to detect false negatives in binary defect detection networks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to proactively identify potentially erroneous network outputs. Our core idea leverages the difference between class-specific discriminative heatmaps and class-agnostic ones. We compute the difference in their intersection over union (IoU) as a reliability score. An adversarial enhancement method is further introduced to amplify this disparity. Evaluations on two industrial defect detection benchmarks show our method effectively identifies false negatives. With adversarial enhancement, it achieves 100% recall, albeit with a trade-off for true negatives. Our work thus advocates for a new and trustworthy deployment paradigm: data-model-explanation-output, moving beyond conventional end-to-end systems to provide critical support for reliable AI in real-world applications.
Understanding U.S. Users' Security and Privacy Transparency Needs for Consumer-Facing Generative AI
Users increasingly rely on consumer-facing generative AI (GenAI) for tasks ranging from everyday needs to sensitive use cases. Yet, it remains unclear whether and how existing security and privacy (S&P) communications in GenAI tools shape users' adoption decisions and experiences. Understanding how users seek, interpret, and evaluate S&P information is critical for designing usable transparency that users can trust and act on. We conducted semi-structured interviews and design sessions with 21 U.S. GenAI users. Our findings suggest that available S&P information rarely drove initial adoption in practice, as participants often perceived it as incomplete, ineffective, or not credible. Instead, they relied on rough proxies (e.g., popularity) to infer S&P practices. After adoption, S&P uncertainty constrained participants' willingness to use GenAI tools, especially for high-stakes purposes, and, in some cases, contributed to discontinued use. Participants therefore called for transparency that supports decisions and actions through trustworthy information (e.g., independent evaluations) and usable interfaces (e.g., on-demand disclosure). We categorize participants' desired design practices into five dimensions to facilitate systematic future investigation into best practices. We conclude with recommendations for researchers, designers, and policymakers to improve S&P transparency in consumer-facing GenAI.
LLMs can persuade only psychologically susceptible humans on societal issues, via trust in AI and emotional appeals, amid logical fallacies
Scarce longitudinal evidence examines LLMs' persuasiveness and humanness along time-evolving psychological frameworks. We introduce Talk2AI, a longitudinal framework quantifying psycho-social, reasoning and affective dimensions of LLMs' persuasiveness about polarizing societal topics. In a four-way longitudinal setup, Talk2AI's 770 participants engaged in structured conversations with one of four leading LLMs on topics like climate change, social media misinformation, and math anxiety. This produced 3,080 conversations over 60,000 turns. After each wave, participants reported conviction in their initial topic stance, perceived opinion change, LLM's perceived humanness, a self-donation to the topic and a textual explanation. Feedback time series showed longitudinal inertia in convictions, indicating some human anchoring to initial opinions even after repeated exposure to AI-generated arguments. Interestingly, NLP analyses revealed that both humans and LLMs relied on fallacious reasoning in 1 conversational quip every 6, countering the ``LLMs as superior systems" stereotype behind LLMs' cognitive surrender. LLMs' perceived humanness was most learnable from sociodemographic, psychological and engagement features (), followed by opinion change (), conviction () and personal endowment (). Crucially, explainable AI (XAI) indicated: (i) the presence of individuals more susceptible to LLM-based opinion changes; (ii) psychological susceptibility to LLM-convincing consisted of having more trust in LLMs, being more agreeable and extraverted and with a higher need for cognition. A multiverse approach with mixed-effects models confirmed XAI results, alongside strong individual differences. Talk2AI provides a grounded framework and evidence for detecting how GenAI can influence human opinions via multiple psycho-social pathways in AI-human digital platforms.
Overreliance on AI in Information-seeking from Video Content
The ubiquity of multimedia content is reshaping online information spaces, particularly in social media environments. At the same time, search is being rapidly transformed by generative AI, with large language models (LLMs) routinely deployed as intermediaries between users and multimedia content to retrieve and summarize information. Despite their growing influence, the impact of LLM inaccuracies and potential vulnerabilities on multimedia information-seeking tasks remains largely unexplored. We investigate how generative AI affects accuracy, efficiency, and confidence in information retrieval from videos. We conduct an experiment with around 900 participants on 8,000+ video-based information-seeking tasks, comparing behavior across three conditions: (1) access to videos only, (2) access to videos with LLM-based AI assistance, and (3) access to videos with a deceiving AI assistant designed to provide false answers. We find that AI assistance increases accuracy by 3-7% when participants viewed the relevant video segment, and by 27-35% when they did not. Efficiency increases by 10% for short videos and 25% for longer ones. However, participants tend to over-rely on AI outputs, resulting in accuracy drops of up to 32% when interacting with the deceiving AI. Alarmingly, self-reported confidence in answers remains stable across all three conditions. Our findings expose fundamental safety risks in AI-mediated video information retrieval.
Strategic Advice in the Age of Personal AI
Personal AI assistants are changing how individuals use advice. We study how an advisor should design its recommendation in anticipation of stochastic consultation with personal AI whose recommendation is predictable. Personal AI enters through two dimensions: consultation probability and relative trust, which captures the relative influence personal AI receives when consulted. In the baseline model, the advisor optimally counteracts the personal AI signal. Counteraction increases with consultation probability but is hump-shaped in relative trust. The advisor's minimized loss is hump-shaped in consultation probability, vanishing when personal AI is never or always consulted. Greater relative trust in personal AI increases the irreducible loss arising from stochastic consultation. We extend the analysis to partial predictability and costly recommendation adjustment, characterizing their effects on optimal recommendations and minimized loss. The framework also accommodates richer information structures, including settings in which personal AI is perceived as having access to private information relevant to the task. We introduce an online forecasting experiment that examines how participants obtain personal AI advice and combine it with an advisor's recommendation and their initial judgments. Participants place weight on all three inputs. When access requires an additional action, some participants do not seek personal AI advice, while some others attempt to obtain it without success. Together, these findings highlight two distinct aspects of personal AI use: whether advice is obtained and how much weight it receives when available.
A User-driven Design Framework for Robotaxi
Robotaxis are emerging as a promising form of urban mobility, but removing human drivers fundamentally reshapes passenger-vehicle interaction and raises new design challenges. To inform robotaxi design based on real-world experience, we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews and autoethnographic ride experiences to examine users' perceptions, experiences, and expectations for robotaxi design. We found that users valued benefits such as increased agency and consistent driving. However, they also encountered challenges such as limited flexibility, insufficient transparency, and emergency handling concerns. Notably, users perceived robotaxis not merely as a mode of transportation, but as autonomous, semi-private transitional spaces, which made users feel less socially intrusive to engage in personal activities. Safety perceptions were polarized: some felt anxiety about reduced control, while others viewed robotaxis as safer than humans due to their cautious, law-abiding nature. Based on the findings, we propose a user-driven design framework spanning hailing, pick-up, traveling, and drop-off phases to support trustworthy, transparent, and accountable robotaxi design.
Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be persuasive across a variety of contexts. But it remains unclear whether this persuasive power advantages accuracy, or if bad actors can just as easily use LLMs to promote misbeliefs. Here, we investigate this question across four experiments in which participants (N = 3996 Americans) discussed a conspiracy theory they were uncertain about with an LLM we instructed to either argue against ("debunking") or for ("bunking") that conspiracy. Across several frontier models (with standard guardrails but prompted to allow lying), we did not find consistent evidence of a truth advantage: the LLMs were able to both substantially increase and decrease average conspiracy belief, and participants in the bunking condition rated the LLM as more informative and collaborative, and reported greater trust in AI, than those who were in the debunking condition. More encouragingly, however, debunking induced more large changes in belief, and subsequent corrections were able to reverse the bunking effect. Furthermore, simply prompting the model to only provide accurate information dramatically reduced bunking effectiveness, and one powerful frontier model (GPT 5.2) almost entirely refused to promote conspiracies, suggesting that it is possible for the right guardrails to favor accurate beliefs. Finally, we did find a stark truth asymmetry in the context of information sharing: debunking had a large positive impact on mock social media posts composed by participants, while bunking had little effect. Overall, our findings show that people are not inherently less susceptible to AI that misleads than to AI that informs, but that potential technical solutions exist to mitigate this risk.
CAT: Can Trust be Predicted with Context-Awareness in Dynamic Heterogeneous Networks?
Trust prediction provides valuable support for decision-making, risk mitigation, and system security enhancement. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for trust prediction, owing to their ability to learn expressive node representations that capture intricate trust relationships within a network. However, current GNN-based trust prediction models face several limitations: (i) Most of them fail to capture trust dynamicity, leading to questionable inferences. (ii) They rarely consider the heterogeneous nature of real-world networks, resulting in a loss of rich semantics. (iii) None of them support context-awareness, a basic property of trust, making prediction results coarse-grained. To this end, we propose CAT, the first Context-Aware GNN-based Trust prediction model that supports trust dynamicity and accurately represents real-world heterogeneity. CAT consists of a graph construction layer, an embedding layer, a heterogeneous attention layer, and a prediction layer. It handles dynamic graphs using continuous-time representations and captures temporal information through a time encoding function. To model graph heterogeneity and leverage semantic information, CAT employs a dual attention mechanism that identifies the importance of different node types and nodes within each type. For context-awareness, we introduce a new notion of meta-paths to extract contextual features. By constructing context embeddings and integrating a context-aware aggregator, CAT can predict both context-aware trust and overall trust. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CAT outperforms five groups of baselines in trust prediction, while exhibiting strong scalability to large-scale graphs and robustness against both trust-oriented and GNN-oriented attacks.
Critical or Compliant? The Double-Edged Sword of Reasoning in Chain-of-Thought Explanations
Explanations are often promoted as tools for transparency, but they can also foster confirmation bias; users may assume reasoning is correct whenever outputs appear acceptable. We study this double-edged role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations in multimodal moral scenarios by systematically perturbing reasoning chains and manipulating delivery tones. Specifically, we analyze reasoning errors in vision language models (VLMs) and how they impact user trust and the ability to detect errors. Our findings reveal two key effects: (1) users often equate trust with outcome agreement, sustaining reliance even when reasoning is flawed, and (2) the confident tone suppresses error detection while maintaining reliance, showing that delivery styles can override correctness. These results highlight how CoT explanations can simultaneously clarify and mislead, underscoring the need for NLP systems to provide explanations that encourage scrutiny and critical thinking rather than blind trust. All code will be released publicly.
Human-AI Complementarity: A Goal for Amplified Oversight
Human feedback is critical for aligning AI systems to human values. As AI capabilities improve and AI is used to tackle more challenging tasks, verifying quality and safety becomes increasingly challenging. This paper explores how we can leverage AI to improve the quality of human oversight. We focus on an important safety problem that is already challenging for humans: fact-verification of AI outputs. We find that combining AI ratings and human ratings based on AI rater confidence is better than relying on either alone. Giving humans an AI fact-verification assistant further improves their accuracy, but the type of assistance matters. Displaying AI explanation, confidence, and labels leads to over-reliance, but just showing search results and evidence fosters more appropriate trust. These results have implications for Amplified Oversight -- the challenge of combining humans and AI to supervise AI systems even as they surpass human expert performance.