"How do I fool you?": Manipulating User Trust via Misleading Black Box Explanations
This addresses the risk of deceptive AI explanations in critical domains like healthcare and criminal justice, highlighting a novel security and trust issue.
The paper tackles the problem of misleading explanations for black-box machine learning models, showing that high-fidelity explanations can manipulate user trust, as demonstrated through a user study with domain experts.
As machine learning black boxes are increasingly being deployed in critical domains such as healthcare and criminal justice, there has been a growing emphasis on developing techniques for explaining these black boxes in a human interpretable manner. It has recently become apparent that a high-fidelity explanation of a black box ML model may not accurately reflect the biases in the black box. As a consequence, explanations have the potential to mislead human users into trusting a problematic black box. In this work, we rigorously explore the notion of misleading explanations and how they influence user trust in black-box models. More specifically, we propose a novel theoretical framework for understanding and generating misleading explanations, and carry out a user study with domain experts to demonstrate how these explanations can be used to mislead users. Our work is the first to empirically establish how user trust in black box models can be manipulated via misleading explanations.