Superhuman Game AI Disclosure: Expertise and Context Moderate Effects on Trust and Fairness
It addresses the problem of designing effective AI transparency for fairness and trust in gaming, but is incremental as it builds on existing research with a specific dataset and limited sample size.
This paper investigated how disclosing superhuman AI capabilities in competitive StarCraft II scenarios affects user trust and fairness, finding that transparency can both alleviate suspicion and provoke frustration or overreliance, with effects varying by user expertise and context.
As artificial intelligence surpasses human performance in select tasks, disclosing superhuman capabilities poses distinct challenges for fairness, accountability, and trust. However, the impact of such disclosures on diverse user attitudes and behaviors remains unclear, particularly concerning potential negative reactions like discouragement or overreliance. This paper investigates these effects by utilizing Persona Cards: a validated, standardized set of synthetic personas designed to simulate diverse user reactions and fairness perspectives. We conducted an ethics board-approved study (N=32), utilizing these personas to investigate how capability disclosure influenced behaviors with a superhuman game AI in competitive StarCraft II scenarios. Our results reveal transparency is double-edged: while disclosure could alleviate suspicion, it also provoked frustration and strategic defeatism among novices in cooperative scenarios, as well as overreliance in competitive contexts. Experienced and competitive players interpreted disclosure as confirmation of an unbeatable opponent, shifting to suboptimal goals. We release the Persona Cards Dataset, including profiles, prompts, interaction logs, and protocols, to foster reproducible research into human alignment AI design. This work demonstrates that transparency is not a cure-all; successfully leveraging disclosure to enhance trust and accountability requires careful tailoring to user characteristics, domain norms, and specific fairness objectives.