Towards a computational model of responsibility judgments in sequential human-AI collaboration

Abstract

When a human and an AI agent collaborate to complete a task and something goes wrong, who is responsible? Prior work has developed theories to describe how people assign responsibility to individuals in teams. However, there has been little work studying the cognitive processes that underlie responsibility judgments in human-AI collaborations, especially for tasks comprising a sequence of interdependent actions. In this work, we take a step towards filling this gap. Using semiautonomous driving as a paradigm, we develop an environment that simulates stylized cases of human-AI collaboration using a generative model of agent behavior. We propose a model of responsibility that considers how unexpected an agent’s action was, and what would have happened had they acted differently. We test the model’s predictions empirically and find that in addition to action expectations and counterfactual considerations, participants’ responsibility judgments are also affected by how much each agent actually contributed to the outcome.