MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 38.03.00
Transparency and explainability
Description
"A recurring complaint among participants was a lack of knowledge about how AI systems made judgements. They emphasized the significance of making AI systems more visible and explainable so that people may have confidence in their outputs and hold them accountable for their activities. Because AI systems are typically opaque, making it difficult for users to understand the rationale behind their judgements, ethical concerns about AI, as well as issues of transparency and explainability, arise. This lack of understanding can generate suspicion and reluctance to adopt AI technology, as well as m
From Ethical Issues in the Development of Artificial Intelligence: Recognizing the Risks (Kumar2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
Subdomain definition: Challenges in understanding or explaining the decision-making processes of AI systems, which can lead to mistrust, difficulty in enforcing compliance standards or holding relevant actors accountable for harms, and the inability to identify and correct errors.
Real-world incidents in this subdomain
- Uber Launched Opaque Algorithm That Changes Drivers' Payments in the US
- Israeli Tax Authority Reportedly Used an Opaque Automated System to Issue a Fine, Declining to Explain or Disclose the Underlying Calculation
- Uber Allegedly Wrongfully Accused Drivers of Fraud via Automated Systems
- Houston ISD's EVAAS Teacher-Evaluation System Reportedly Put Teachers' Jobs at Risk Through Unverifiable Scores
- Dutch City Court Defended Home Value Generated by Black-Box Algorithm
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Intelligibility
- Attributing the responsibility for AI's failures
- Model Evaluations (Interpretability/Explainability)
- Model outputs inconsistent with chain-of-thought reasoning
- Lack of understanding of in-context learning in language models
- General Evaluations (Difficulty of identification and measurement of capabilities)
- Lack of transparency and interpretability
- Opacity (the black box problem)