Let’s say you’re a loan officer — a customer-facing role in a highly regulated industry. If you tell a loan applicant they don’t qualify for funding, citing your firm’s fancy AI algorithm, do they trust that you’re doing the right thing? Maybe they’ve heard of cases in which AI decision-making processes were biased, and they’re skeptical.
Their reaction could depend on how transparent your company’s AI systems are. From model development to the interpretation of AI decisions, transparency around AI’s inner workings can change everything.
When people know why an artificial intelligence system has come to a conclusion, even if the decision isn’t favorable for them, they’re naturally likely to feel reassured.
The concept of AI transparency emerged in the 1970s, when automated systems were unveiled to rate people’s creditworthiness.
AI transparency — making computational results explainable in a way that people can grasp — implies a clear viewing of what’s taking place. With AI technology, transparency amounts to openness: being able to understand how a machine-learning algorithm is processing or has processed information and being able to explain it in a way people can comprehend.
What logic was applied? What inputs and outputs were involved? Knowing what’s influenced an algorithm’s workings is aptly known as algorithmic transparency.
How and why an algorithm arrived at a decision about a loan is an example of algorithmic transparency, and available details might include:
Without transparency, trust can be lost, and that’s a huge deal. So experts in the business, government, and consumer realms agree that when it comes to AI system output, transparency isn’t optional; it’s required for building trust.
Being able to see how AI generates output reframes it from an independent agent making decisions to a tool used by humans.
According to AI transparency experts Reid Blackman and Beena Ammanath, building transparency into AI systems lowers the risk of error and misuse, distributes responsibility, and allows for internal and external oversight.
Cultivating and maintaining customer trust has always been a priority, but now, with the advent of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), it’s taking on new significance.
Knowledge is power: everyone from developers to CEOs to consumers needs visibility on how AI is “thinking” in order to get the whole picture. And transparency is not just essential for protecting customer trust, it’s a foundational requirement for business success.
A business must understand how each phase of AI processing impacts output and make adjustments as needed, such as by compensating for bias in conversational AI. It must also be able to ensure accountability.
AI models remember anywhere from a handful to billions of numbers that are involved in the complex math AI performs. Those numbers, to some extent, can represent “concepts” learned, and the exact combination of those numbers defines the model’s behavior.
But how easily can a human understand the complex math an AI model performs? This is interpretability: how well the AI internal parameters map to human concepts.
The goal of interpretability is to figure out what the individual parameters do. The more that parameters can be mapped to human concepts, the more interpretable the AI can become.
Treating AI as a tool that needs to explain itself instead of an unquestionable, independent agent is explainable AI. However, unlike interpretability, explainability doesn’t require knowing what each parameter does; it’s focused on disclosing why a decision was reached in a way that humans understand.
How might this work, for example, with someone denied a loan or not admitted to college? The response letter could disclose the AI input (e.g., credit history) used in the calculations and note which type of input had the most significant impact on the decision.
If they can point to how the model was trained and performed according to expectations, they can potentially ward off criticism.
It’s natural to expect people to be accountable for their actions. With algorithms, that prospect is murky; how do you hold a machine accountable? You can’t.
However, the humans involved in building, training, and operating an AI system can be held accountable if it can be proven that their contributions directly caused an unfavorable outcome.
But having someone unambiguously accountable is also complicated, as nobody wants to assume that liability
Ensuring trust is, of course, the overarching benefit of being transparent with AI. Trustworthiness encompasses a variety of advantages as well:
First, the good news: with advance planning, transparency as part of a responsible AI practices ecosystem is thought to be achievable.
When Harvard Business Review tested various AI models on representative datasets, they discovered that 70% of the time “there was no tradeoff between accuracy and explainability: A more-explainable model could be used without sacrificing accuracy.”
But while AI transparency may be technically achievable to varying degrees, if transparency isn’t prioritized at inception, say developers, the toothpaste will be difficult to put back in the tube later. And, depending on the application, even with the best intentions, there may still be some formidable obstacles.
AI use cases vary wildly in terms of how much information can be understood about systems’ inner workings. In addition, “transparency” is a broad concept with no single agreed-on definition.
Like other aspects of AI use, it’s an actively evolving discipline, and that complicates well-meaning pursuits such as setting and enforcing standards.
Challenges with AI transparency include:
While AI development has certainly been moving along, laws that govern the technology’s transparency, accountability, and other “ethical” aspects are still in various stages of evolution.
Deciding on global standards for transparency is like herding cats, as companies, developers, ethics proponents, and policymakers must all weigh in and agree on initiatives.
A few comprehensive laws requiring AI systems to be transparent for legal and ethical reasons have been formulated, but globally, legal guidance meant to govern AI is inconsistent.
Current AI-related legislation includes:
What’s next for AI regulations? MIT Technology Review anticipates that “the first sweeping AI laws” will go into effect soon.
Following best practices for AI transparency in its current state can promote trust among businesses, developers, and customers.
Below are some strategies companies can apply to start making their AI machine-learning model processes more transparent:
Search is one area where it’s critical for a business to understand how an AI system impacts the results people see.
With Algolia, search relevance computations are transparent: you’ll know what our AI features do, where and how they impact the user experience, and how they work alongside other features.
Your marketers will see how search results are ranked based on personalization and relevance factors; they can then assess and manually adjust the results.
Check out the advantages of smart search with an Algolia demo.
Catherine Dee
Search and Discovery writerPowered by Algolia AI Recommendations
Vincent Caruana
Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEOCatherine Dee
Search and Discovery writerVincent Caruana
Senior Digital Marketing Manager, SEO