Following Delegation Traces to Study Human Oversight in Interaction with Multimodal AI

Abstract

As multimodal AI systems are becoming our everyday thought partners, the shift towards studying how users transfer control to these systems becomes especially urgent. In this paper, we report an overview of findings from an online study with n=56 AI-literate participants and 392 Video Question Answering trials. After inspecting each multimodal AI response, participants rated task-specific trust and selected one of three intended policies for an analogous future task: reject AI assistance, use it with verification, or delegate fully to the AI. Within participants, post-interaction trust strongly predicted the user's delegation choices (OR=14.97, 95% CI [7.14,31.37]). Trust and delegation nevertheless remained distinct. Verification was the dominant policy and often co-occurred with high trust. Delegation also increased with task order after adjustment for momentary and participant-level trust (OR=1.22, 95% CI [1.02,1.45]), indicating an experience-related component that self-reported trust ratings alone could not capture. These findings motivate a shift from intended delegation to a non-intrusive observation of how delegation is enacted in collaborative human-AI tasks. We therefore conclude by proposing enacted delegation traces as a methodological framework for future studies of multimodal and agentic AI use.