Don't blame me: How Intelligent Support Affects Moral Responsibility in Human Oversight

TL;DR

This study investigates how AI decision support systems that restrict human oversight influence perceived moral responsibility, revealing that restrictions can reduce overseers' sense of responsibility in critical safety scenarios.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into how restriction-based AI support affects human moral responsibility perceptions during autonomous system oversight.

Findings

Participants felt less responsible when restricted to a single action.

Responsibility attribution to AI and developers remained unchanged across conditions.

Design implications for oversight systems to clarify moral responsibility distribution.

Abstract

AI-based systems can increasingly perform work tasks autonomously. In safety-critical tasks, human oversight of these systems is required to mitigate risks and to ensure responsibility in case something goes wrong. Since people often struggle to stay focused and perform good oversight, intelligent support systems are used to assist them, giving decision recommendations, alerting users, or restricting them from dangerous actions. However, in cases where recommendations are wrong, decision support might undermine the very reason why human oversight was employed -- genuine moral responsibility. The goal of our study was to investigate how a decision support system that restricted available interventions would affect overseer's perceived moral responsibility, in particular in cases where the support errs. In a simulated oversight experiment, participants (\textit{N}=274) monitored an autonomous drone that faced ten critical situations, choosing from six possible actions to resolve each situation. An AI system constrained participants' choices to either six, four, two, or only one option (between-subject study). Results showed that participants, who were restricted to choosing from a single action, felt less morally responsible if a crash occurred. At the same time, participants' judgments about the responsibility of other stakeholders (the AI; the developer of the AI) did not change between conditions. Our findings provide important insights for user interface design and oversight architectures: they should prevent users from attributing moral agency to AI, help them understand how moral responsibility is distributed, and, when oversight aims to prevent ethically undesirable outcomes, be designed to support the epistemic and causal conditions required for moral responsibility.