When users perceive AI systems as mindful, independent agents, they hold them responsible instead of the AI experts who created and designed these systems. So far, it has not been studied whether explanations support this shift in responsibility through the use of mind-attributing verbs like "to think". To better understand the prevalence of mind-attributing explanations we analyse AI explanations in 3,533 explainable AI (XAI) research articles from the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (S2ORC). Using methods from semantic shift detection, we identify three dominant types of mind attribution: (1) metaphorical (e.g. "to learn" or "to predict"), (2) awareness (e.g. "to consider"), and (3) agency (e.g. "to make decisions"). We then analyse the impact of mind-attributing explanations on awareness and responsibility in a vignette-based experiment with 199 participants. We find that participants who were given a mind-attributing explanation were more likely to rate the AI system as aware of the harm it caused. Moreover, the mind-attributing explanation had a responsibility-concealing effect: Considering the AI experts' involvement lead to reduced ratings of AI responsibility for participants who were given a non-mind-attributing or no explanation. In contrast, participants who read the mind-attributing explanation still held the AI system responsible despite considering the AI experts' involvement. Taken together, our work underlines the need to carefully phrase explanations about AI systems in scientific writing to reduce mind attribution and clearly communicate human responsibility.

翻译：当用户将人工智能系统视为具有心智的独立主体时，他们会将这些系统而非创造与设计这些系统的AI专家视为责任方。目前尚不明确解释是否通过使用"思考"等心智归因动词支持这种责任转移。为深入理解心智归因解释的普遍性，我们基于语义学者开放研究语料库（S2ORC）中的3,533篇可解释人工智能（XAI）研究论文，对AI解释进行分析。运用语义变迁检测方法，我们识别出三种主导性心智归因类型：（1）隐喻性（如"学习"或"预测"）、（2）意识性（如"考虑"）以及（3）主体性（如"决策"）。随后，我们通过一项包含199名参与者的情境模拟实验，分析心智归因解释对认知度与责任归属的影响。研究发现，接收心智归因解释的参与者更容易将AI系统判定为对其造成的伤害具有认知能力。此外，心智归因解释具有责任隐匿效应：当考虑AI专家的参与时，接收非心智归因或无解释的参与者对AI系统责任的评分会降低；而阅读心智归因解释的参与者在考虑AI专家参与后，仍会将责任归咎于AI系统。综合而言，本研究强调在科学写作中需谨慎措辞解释AI系统，以减少心智归因并清晰传达人类责任。