Quality Without Usefulness: LLM-Generated XAI Narratives as Trust Heuristics Rather Than Decision Aids
Prior work shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) can transform Explainable AI (XAI) outputs into Natural Language Explanations (NLEs) that score highly on quality metrics such as plausibility, coherence, and comprehensibility. But does explanation quality translate to practical usefulness? We investigate this question in a time-series energy forecasting domain through five controlled experiments (2,730 judgments across 60 test instances), each operationalising a distinct facet of usefulness studied in the XAI literature. Holding NLE quality constant at the high levels established by a prior factorial study, we find that NLEs do not improve task accuracy on any of the five tasks, while i...
| Authors | Fabian Lukassen, Jan Herrmann, Christoph Weisser et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.