Measuring Human Adaptation to AI in Decision Making: Application to Evaluate Changes after AlphaGo

Abstract: Across a growing number of domains, human experts are expected to learn from and adapt to AI with superior decision making abilities. But how can we quantify such human adaptation to AI? We develop a simple measure of human adaptation to AI and test its usefulness in two case studies. In Study 1, we analyze 1.3 million move decisions made by professional Go players and find that a positive form of adaptation to AI (learning) occurred after the players could observe the reasoning processes of AI, rather than mere actions of AI. These findings based on our measure highlight the importance of explainability for human learning from AI. In Study 2, we test whether our measure is sufficiently sensitive to capture a negative form of adaptation to AI (cheating aided by AI), which occurred in a match between professional Go players. We discuss our measure's applications in domains other than Go, especially in domains in which AI's decision making ability will likely surpass that of human experts.