# Unraveling the Dilemma of AI Errors: Exploring the Effectiveness of Human and Machine Explanations for Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07725/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10045/) (2019)
- [Towards A Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08608/) (2017)
- [Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07269/) (2017)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [SmoothGrad: removing noise by adding noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03825/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [A Survey Of Methods For Explaining Black Box Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01933/) (2018)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [The Mythos of Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03490/) (2016)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Explaining Machine Learning Classifiers through Diverse Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07697/) (2019)
- [Captum: A unified and generic model interpretability library for PyTorch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07896/) (2020)
- [Fooling LIME and SHAP: Adversarial Attacks on Post hoc Explanation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02508/) (2019)
- [Does the Whole Exceed its Parts? The Effect of AI Explanations on Complementary Team Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14779/) (2020)
- [A Multiscale Visualization of Attention in the Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05714/) (2019)
- [Effect of Confidence and Explanation on Accuracy and Trust Calibration in AI-Assisted Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02114/) (2020)
- [Metrics for Explainable AI: Challenges and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04608/) (2018)
- [Manipulating and Measuring Model Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07810/) (2018)
- [A Survey of the State of Explainable AI for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00711/) (2020)
- [Proxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08298/) (2020)
- [The elephant in the interpretability room: Why use attention as explanation when we have saliency methods?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05607/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Fostering Appropriate Reliance on Large Language Models: The Role of Explanations, Sources, and Inconsistencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08554/) (2025)
- [ChatGPT and U(X): A Rapid Review on Measuring the User Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15808/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has produced a plethora of methods (e.g., saliency-maps) to gain insight into artificial intelligence (AI) models, and has exploded with the rise of deep learning (DL). However, human-participant studies question the efficacy of these methods, particularly when the AI output is wrong. In this study, we collected and analyzed 156 human-generated text and saliency-based explanations collected in a question-answering task (N=40) and compared them empirically to state-of-the-art XAI explanations (integrated gradients, conservative LRP, and ChatGPT) in a human-participant study (N=136). Our findings show that participants found human saliency maps to be more helpful in explaining AI answers than machine saliency maps, but performance negatively correlated with trust in the AI model and explanations. This finding hints at the dilemma of AI errors in explanation, where helpful explanations can lead to lower task performance when they support wrong AI predictions.