How Aligned are Generative Models to Humans in High-Stakes Decision-Making?

Large generative models (LMs) are increasingly being considered for high-stakes decision-making. This work considers how such models compare to humans and predictive AI models on a specific case of recidivism prediction. We combine three datasets -- COMPAS predictive AI risk scores, human recidivism judgements, and photos -- into a dataset on which we study the properties of several state-of-the-art, multimodal LMs. Beyond accuracy and bias, we focus on studying human-LM alignment on the task of recidivism prediction. We investigate if these models can be steered towards human decisions, the impact of adding photos, and whether anti-discimination prompting is effective. We find that LMs can be steered to outperform humans and COMPAS using in context-learning. We find anti-discrimination prompting to have unintended effects, causing some models to inhibit themselves and significantly reduce their number of positive predictions.

Advancing Human-AI Complementarity: The Impact of User Expertise and Algorithmic Tuning on Joint Decision Making

Human-AI collaboration for decision-making strives to achieve team performance that exceeds the performance of humans or AI alone. However, many factors can impact success of Human-AI teams, including a user's domain expertise, mental models of an AI system, trust in recommendations, and more. This work examines users' interaction with three simulated algorithmic models, all with similar accuracy but different tuning on their true positive and true negative rates. Our study examined user performance in a non-trivial blood vessel labeling task where participants indicated whether a given blood vessel was flowing or stalled. Our results show that while recommendations from an AI-Assistant can aid user decision making, factors such as users' baseline performance relative to the AI and complementary tuning of AI error types significantly impact overall team performance. Novice users improved, but not to the accuracy level of the AI. Highly proficient users were generally able to discern when they should follow the AI recommendation and typically maintained or improved their performance. Mid-performers, who had a similar level of accuracy to the AI, were most variable in terms of whether the AI recommendations helped or hurt their performance. In addition, we found that users' perception of the AI's performance relative on their own also had a significant impact on whether their accuracy improved when given AI recommendations. This work provides insights on the complexity of factors related to Human-AI collaboration and provides recommendations on how to develop human-centered AI algorithms to complement users in decision-making tasks.