The Human-Centered Approach to Design and Evaluate Symbiotic AI Systems

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is spreading in many domains, revolutionizing the way individuals conceive their working and private life; it enhances many tasks by automating decision-making and augmenting human capabilities. It is necessary to design high-quality AI systems that focus on the users’ priorities and avoid potential unethical and unexpected behaviours. The widespread adoption of AI solutions faces challenges related to their transparency, since humans must be enabled to fully understand the outputs of such systems in order to make informed decisions. To address these concerns, a shift toward a human-centered approach is emerging when it comes to interact with AI systems. In this new scenario, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a pivotal role and contaminates AI to reach the human-AI symbiosis. Designers and developers should gravitate towards Symbiotic AI (SAI), which has the goal to support humans without replacing them and establish a symbiotic relationship with users, adapting to their cognitive models. This contribution aims to present a proposal of a framework to design high-quality SAI systems and metrics that can be employed to appropriately evaluate them. Opportunities and challenges that characterize this new research context are also presented and discussed.