Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A reason to believe?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is an alluring technology which companies and governments hope to benefit from. In many circumstances a condition of its use is that humans can understand an explanation of why the action of an AI system took place. This has encouraged the development of a field of “explainable artificial intelligence”, or XAI. Much of the work in this field has been encouraged by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), through its XAI program initiated in 2016. This paper argues that an underacknowledged challenge of XAI is that unlike most traditional technology, many AI systems contain inherent uncertainty. These systems are widely described as “black boxes”, and ..