In a test based on playing an online game, study participants disagreed with 66% of the advice offered by an artificial intelligence. U.S. Army researchers and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara have found a persistent gap in basic knowledge about the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and it is unknown which AI aspects will or will not help military decision-making. The researchers developed an online game in which players obtained points by making good decisions in each round; an AI was used to generate advice in each round, which was shown alongside the game interface. The AI also made suggestions about which decisions players should make, which they were free to accept or ignore. About 66% of human decisions disagreed with the AI, regardless of the number of errors in the suggestions.

Army scientists recently attempted to answer a similar question due to an ongoing concern that artificial intelligence, which can be opaque and frustrating to many people, may not be helpful in battlefield decision making. "The U.S. Army continues to push the modernization of its forces, with notable efforts including the development of smartphone-based software for real-time information delivery such as the Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK, and the allocation of significant funding towards researching new AI and machine learning methods to assist command and control personnel," said Dr. James Schaffer, scientist for RDECOM's Army Research Laboratory, the Army's corporate research laboratory (ARL), at ARL West in Playa Vista, California. According to Schaffer, despite these advances, a significant gap in basic knowledge about the use of AI still exists, and it is unknown which factors of AI will or will not help military decision-making processes. University and corporate research has made significant headway into solving this problem for applications like movie and restaurant recommendations, but the findings do not exactly translate to the military world. "For instance, many research studies and A/B testing, such as those performed by Amazon, have experimented with different forms of persuasion, argumentation and user interface styles to determine the winning combination that moves the most product or inspires the most trust," Schaffer said.