Adding narrative explanations to AI predictions can backfire: they increase trust in AI without improving accuracy, and may actually harm decision quality by making people slower to question wrong predictions.
This study tested how AI-generated narrative explanations affect human decision-making in classification tasks. Researchers found that persuasive explanations didn't improve accuracy compared to predictions alone, but did increase reliance on AI—even when the AI was wrong. More persuasive narratives sometimes slowed decisions and made it harder to spot AI errors.