David Lagnado

Maria Victoria Carro, David Lagnado

AI-related incidents are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, ranging from safety failures to misuse by malicious actors. In such complex situations, identifying which elements caused an adverse outcome, the problem of cause selection, is a critical first step for establishing liability. This paper investigates folk perceptions of causal responsibility in causal chain structures when AI systems are involved in harmful outcomes. We conduct human experiments to examine judgments of causality, blame, foreseeability, and counterfactual reasoning. Our findings show that: (1) When AI agency was moderate (human sets the goal, AI determines the means) or high (AI sets the goal and the means), participants attributed greater causal responsibility to the AI. However, under low AI agency (where a human sets both a goal and means) participants assigned greater causal responsibility to the human despite their temporal distance from the outcome and despite both agents intended it, suggesting an effect of autonomy; (2) When we reversed roles between human and AI, participants consistently judged the human as more causal, even when both agents perform the same action; (3) The developer, despite being distant in the chain, was judged highly causal, reducing causal attributions to the human user but not to the AI; (4) Decomposing the AI into a large language model and an agentic component showed that the agentic part was judged as more causal in the chain. Overall, our research provides evidence on how people perceive the causal contribution of AI in both misuse and misalignment scenarios, and how these judgments interact with the roles of users and developers, key actors in assigning responsibility. These findings can inform the design of liability frameworks for AI-caused harms and shed light on how intuitive judgments shape social and policy debates surrounding real-world AI-related incidents.

Magnus F. Gjerde, Vanessa Cheung, David Lagnado

With the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), it becomes increasingly important to understand their abilities and limitations. In two experiments, we investigate the causal and compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs and humans in the domain of object affordances, an area traditionally linked to embodied cognition. The tasks, designed from scratch to avoid data contamination, require decision-makers to select unconventional objects to replace a typical tool for a particular purpose, such as using a table tennis racket to dig a hole. In Experiment 1, we evaluated GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o, finding that GPT-4o, when given chain-of-thought prompting, performed on par with human participants, while GPT-3.5 lagged significantly. In Experiment 2, we introduced two new conditions, Distractor (more object choices, increasing difficulty) and Image (object options presented visually), and evaluated Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in addition to the GPT models. The Distractor condition significantly impaired performance across humans and models, although GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 still performed well above chance. Surprisingly, the Image condition had little impact on humans or GPT-4o, but significantly lowered Claude 3.5's accuracy. Qualitative analysis showed that GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 have a stronger ability than their predecessors to identify and flexibly apply causally relevant object properties. The improvement from GPT-3.5 and Claude 3 to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 suggests that models are increasingly capable of causal and compositional reasoning in some domains, although further mechanistic research is necessary to understand how LLMs reason.

Ann E. Nicholson, Kevin B. Korb, Erik P. Nyberg et al.

In many complex, real-world situations, problem solving and decision making require effective reasoning about causation and uncertainty. However, human reasoning in these cases is prone to confusion and error. Bayesian networks (BNs) are an artificial intelligence technology that models uncertain situations, supporting probabilistic and causal reasoning and decision making. However, to date, BN methodologies and software require significant upfront training, do not provide much guidance on the model building process, and do not support collaboratively building BNs. BARD (Bayesian ARgumentation via Delphi) is both a methodology and an expert system that utilises (1) BNs as the underlying structured representations for better argument analysis, (2) a multi-user web-based software platform and Delphi-style social processes to assist with collaboration, and (3) short, high-quality e-courses on demand, a highly structured process to guide BN construction, and a variety of helpful tools to assist in building and reasoning with BNs, including an automated explanation tool to assist effective report writing. The result is an end-to-end online platform, with associated online training, for groups without prior BN expertise to understand and analyse a problem, build a model of its underlying probabilistic causal structure, validate and reason with the causal model, and use it to produce a written analytic report. Initial experimental results demonstrate that BARD aids in problem solving, reasoning and collaboration.