Title:
Beyond the Hype: Why XAI Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Promise
Abstract:
Calls for making AI safe, trustworthy and fair are made by scholars, legal institutions, NGOs, and customer protection services alike. However, how to best satisfy these desiderata remains the subject of academic, political, and legal debates. Over the past decade or so, research on explainable AI (XAI) has taken center stage in these debates. While there has been a veritable XAI-hype, and XAI clearly can contribute to desiderata satisfaction in some cases, it must be acknowledged that XAI has not delivered the broad desiderata satisfaction it intuitively promised. There are a number of reasons why XAI may fail to successfully lead to desiderata satisfaction, and there are a number of issues traditional XAI cannot successfully address. This talk offers a systematic analysis of XAI’s shortcomings from an interdisciplinary perspective incorporating contributions from philosophy, law, computer science and psychology and sketches possible ways forward.