Just Like Me: The Role of Opinions and Personal Experiences in The Perception of Explanations in Subjective Decision-Making

TL;DR

This study explores how opinions and personal experiences in LLM explanations influence human perception, revealing a bias where aligned experiences increase perceived trustworthiness, raising ethical concerns in subjective decision-making.

Contribution

The paper introduces an analysis of the impact of opinions and personal experiences in LLM-generated explanations within subjective decision-making contexts, highlighting potential biases and ethical issues.

Findings

Participants found explanations with aligned opinions more convincing.

Confirmation bias influences trust in AI explanations.

Ethical challenges arise from AI mimicking human-like experiences.

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) advance to produce human-like arguments in some contexts, the number of settings applicable for human-AI collaboration broadens. Specifically, we focus on subjective decision-making, where a decision is contextual, open to interpretation, and based on one's beliefs and values. In such cases, having multiple arguments and perspectives might be particularly useful for the decision-maker. Using subtle sexism online as an understudied application of subjective decision-making, we suggest that LLM output could effectively provide diverse argumentation to enrich subjective human decision-making. To evaluate the applicability of this case, we conducted an interview study (N=20) where participants evaluated the perceived authorship, relevance, convincingness, and trustworthiness of human and AI-generated explanation-text, generated in response to instances of subtle sexism from the internet. In this workshop paper, we focus on one troubling trend in our results related to opinions and experiences displayed in LLM argumentation. We found that participants rated explanations that contained these characteristics as more convincing and trustworthy, particularly so when those opinions and experiences aligned with their own opinions and experiences. We describe our findings, discuss the troubling role that confirmation bias plays, and bring attention to the ethical challenges surrounding the AI generation of human-like experiences.