Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses
Yifan Ding, Matthew Facciani, Ellen Joyce, Amrit Poudel, Sanmitra Bhattacharya, Balaji Veeramani, Sal Aguinaga, Tim Weninger
Abstract
Question answering systems are rapidly advancing, but their opaque nature may impact user trust. We explored trust through an anti-monitoring framework, where trust is predicted to be correlated with presence of citations and inversely related to checking citations. We tested this hypothesis with a live question-answering experiment that presented text responses generated using a commercial Chatbot along with varying citations (zero, one, or five), both relevant and random, and recorded if participants checked the citations and their self-reported trust in the generated responses. We found a significant increase in trust when citations were present, a result that held true even when the citations were random; we also found a significant decrease in trust when participants checked the citations. These results highlight the importance of citations in enhancing trust in AI-generated content.
BibTeX
@article{Ding_Facciani_Joyce_Poudel_Bhattacharya_Veeramani_Aguinaga_Weninger_2025, title={Citations and Trust in LLM Generated Responses}, volume={39}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/34550}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i22.34550}, abstractNote={Question answering systems are rapidly advancing, but their opaque nature may impact user trust. We explored trust through an anti-monitoring framework, where trust is predicted to be correlated with presence of citations and inversely related to checking citations. We tested this hypothesis with a live question-answering experiment that presented text responses generated using a commercial Chatbot along with varying citations (zero, one, or five), both relevant and random, and recorded if participants checked the citations and their self-reported trust in the generated responses. We found a significant increase in trust when citations were present, a result that held true even when the citations were random; we also found a significant decrease in trust when participants checked the citations. These results highlight the importance of citations in enhancing trust in AI-generated content.}, number={22}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Ding, Yifan and Facciani, Matthew and Joyce, Ellen and Poudel, Amrit and Bhattacharya, Sanmitra and Veeramani, Balaji and Aguinaga, Sal and Weninger, Tim}, year={2025}, month={Apr.}, pages={23787-23795} }