MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 39.19.00
Accountability
Description
An essential feature of decision-making in humans, AI, and also HLI-based agents is accountability. Implementing this feature in machines is a difficult task because many challenges should be considered to organize an AI-based model that is accountable. It should be noted that this issue in human decision-making is not ideal, and many factors such as bias, diversity, fairness, paradox, and ambiguity may affect it. In addition, the human decision-making process is based on personal flexibility, context-sensitive paradigms, empathy, and complex moral judgments. Therefore, all of these challenges
From A Survey of Artificial Intelligence Challenges: Analyzing the Definitions, Relationships, and Evolutions (Saghiri2022), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Other
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)
- General Evaluations (Difficulty of identification and measurement of capabilities)
- Lack of understanding of in-context learning in language models
- Model outputs inconsistent with chain-of-thought reasoning
- Lack of transparency and interpretability
- Opacity (the black box problem)