PhD Scholarship in bias propagation in generative AI-driven decision systems and its implications for trust, governance, and regulatory compliance

The Opportunity

This project addresses a pressing public policy and social issue: the propagation of bias in agentic and generative AI systems and its impact on human decision-making, trust, and regulatory design. The rapid evolution of AI, from generative models that produce text and recommendations to agentic AI systems that autonomously plan, act, and make decisions with limited human oversight, has transformed how critical choices are made across high-stakes domains including financial markets, healthcare, and legal practice. These systems’ capacity to produce biased, yet seemingly neutral, outputs poses a significant and growing risk to fairness, accountability, and public trust.

A core focus of the project is understanding how AI-generated explanations and autonomous AI actions influence trust formation, cognitive effort, and user behaviour, including the risk of over-reliance (automation bias) or inappropriate scepticism when AI outputs are misle...