What Do People Want to Know About Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The Importance of Answering End-User Questions to Explain Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Decisions

TL;DR

This paper investigates end-user questions about autonomous vehicle decisions and demonstrates that interactive explanations significantly enhance user understanding of AI-driven AV behaviors.

Contribution

It identifies key questions end-users have about AV decisions and shows that interactive text explanations improve comprehension over passive observation.

Findings

End-users have specific questions about AV decisions that current explanations do not address.

Interactive explanations improve user understanding of AV AI decisions.

Designing engaging explanations can increase trust and acceptance of AVs.

Abstract

Improving end-users' understanding of decisions made by autonomous vehicles (AVs) driven by artificial intelligence (AI) can improve utilization and acceptance of AVs. However, current explanation mechanisms primarily help AI researchers and engineers in debugging and monitoring their AI systems, and may not address the specific questions of end-users, such as passengers, about AVs in various scenarios. In this paper, we conducted two user studies to investigate questions that potential AV passengers might pose while riding in an AV and evaluate how well answers to those questions improve their understanding of AI-driven AV decisions. Our initial formative study identified a range of questions about AI in autonomous driving that existing explanation mechanisms do not readily address. Our second study demonstrated that interactive text-based explanations effectively improved participants' comprehension of AV decisions compared to simply observing AV decisions. These findings inform the design of interactions that motivate end-users to engage with and inquire about the reasoning behind AI-driven AV decisions.