Ties of Trust: a bowtie model to uncover trustor-trustee relationships in LLMs

Abstract

The rapid and unprecedented dominance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly through Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised critical trust challenges in high-stakes domains like politics. Biased LLMs' decisions and misinformation undermine democratic processes, and existing trust models fail to address the intricacies of trust in LLMs. Currently, oversimplified, one-directional approaches have largely overlooked the many relationships between trustor (user) contextual factors (e.g. ideology, perceptions) and trustee (LLMs) systemic elements (e.g. scientists, tool's features). In this work, we introduce a bowtie model for holistically conceptualizing and formulating trust in LLMs, with a core component comprehensively exploring trust by tying its two sides, namely the trustor and the trustee, as well as their intricate relationships. We uncover these relationships within the proposed bowtie model and beyond to its sociotechnical ecosystem, through a mixed-methods explanatory study, that exploits a political discourse analysis tool (integrating ChatGPT), by exploring and responding to the next critical questions: 1) How do trustor's contextual factors influence trust-related actions? 2) How do these factors influence and interact with trustee systemic elements? 3) How does trust itself vary across trustee systemic elements? Our bowtie-based explanatory analysis reveals that past experiences and familiarity significantly shape trustor's trust-related actions; not all trustor contextual factors equally influence trustee systemic elements; and trustee's human-in-the-loop features enhance trust, while lack of transparency decreases it. Finally, this solid evidence is exploited to deliver recommendations, insights and pathways towards building robust trusting ecosystems in LLM-based solutions.