Humans, ai, and context: Understanding end-users' trust in a real-world computer vision application

SSY Kim, EA Watkins, O Russakovsky, R Fong… - Proceedings of the …, 2023 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and …, 2023dl.acm.org
Trust is an important factor in people's interactions with AI systems. However, there is a lack
of empirical studies examining how real end-users trust or distrust the AI system they interact
with. Most research investigates one aspect of trust in lab settings with hypothetical end-
users. In this paper, we provide a holistic and nuanced understanding of trust in AI through a
qualitative case study of a real-world computer vision application. We report findings from
interviews with 20 end-users of a popular, AI-based bird identification app where we …
Trust is an important factor in people’s interactions with AI systems. However, there is a lack of empirical studies examining how real end-users trust or distrust the AI system they interact with. Most research investigates one aspect of trust in lab settings with hypothetical end-users. In this paper, we provide a holistic and nuanced understanding of trust in AI through a qualitative case study of a real-world computer vision application. We report findings from interviews with 20 end-users of a popular, AI-based bird identification app where we inquired about their trust in the app from many angles. We find participants perceived the app as trustworthy and trusted it, but selectively accepted app outputs after engaging in verification behaviors, and decided against app adoption in certain high-stakes scenarios. We also find domain knowledge and context are important factors for trust-related assessment and decision-making. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide recommendations for future research on trust in AI.
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