INTERNET POLICY REVIEW

Journal on internet regulation Volume 9 | Issue 2

Transparency in artificial intelligence

Stefan Larsson
Department of Technology and Society, Lund University, Sweden, [email protected]

Fredrik Heintz
Department of Computer Science (IDA), Linköping University, Sweden

Published on 05 May 2020 | DOI: 10.14763/2020.2.1469

Abstract: This conceptual paper addresses the issues of transparency as linked to artificial
intelligence (AI) from socio-legal and computer scientific perspectives. Firstly, we discuss the
conceptual distinction between transparency in AI and algorithmic transparency, and argue for
the wider concept ‘in AI’, as a partly contested albeit useful notion in relation to transparency.
Secondly, we show that transparency as a general concept is multifaceted, and of widespread
theoretical use in multiple disciplines over time, particularly since the 1990s. Still, it has had a
resurgence in contemporary notions of AI governance, such as in the multitude of recently
published ethics guidelines on AI. Thirdly, we discuss and show the relevance of the fact that
transparency expresses a conceptual metaphor of more general significance, linked to knowing,
bringing positive connotations that may have normative effects to regulatory debates. Finally,
we draw a possible categorisation of aspects related to transparency in AI, or what we
interchangeably call AI transparency, and argue for the need of developing a multidisciplinary
understanding, in order to contribute to the governance of AI as applied on markets and in
society.

Keywords: Transparency in AI, Algorithmic transparency, Explainable AI, AI governance

Article information
Received: 30 Apr 2019 Reviewed: 27 Sep 2019 Published: 05 May 2020
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany
Funding: The research for this paper has in part been funded by The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous
Systems and Software Program – Humanities and Society (WASP-HS), within the AI Transparency and
Consumer Trust project, as well as The Swedish Research Council (VR; grant no. 2019-00198) in the
AIR Lund (Artificially Intelligent use of Registers at Lund University) research environment, and The
Swedish Retail and Wholesale Council (DATA/TRUST 2018:787).
Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist that have influenced
the text.

URL: http://policyreview.info/concepts/transparency-artificial-intelligence

Citation: Larsson, S. & Heintz, F. (2020). Transparency in artificial intelligence. Internet Policy Review,
9(2). DOI: 10.14763/2020.2.1469

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Transparency in artificial intelligence

INTRODUCTION: TRANSPARENCY IN AI
Transparency is indeed a multifaceted concept used by various disciplines (Margetts, 2011;
Hood, 2006). Recently, it has gone through a resurgence with regards to contemporary
discourses around artificial intelligence (AI). For example, the ethical guidelines published by
the EU Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG) in April 2019 states
transparency as one of seven key requirements for the realisation of ‘trustworthy AI’, which also
has made its clear mark in the Commission’s white paper on AI, published in February 2020. In
fact, “transparency” is the single most common, and one of the key five principles emphasised in
the vast number – a recent study counted 84 – of ethical guidelines addressing AI on a global
level (Jobin et al., 2019). Furthermore, there is a critical discourse on AI and machine learning
about fairness, accountability and transparency.1 The number of publications in the fields
related to AI and machine learning combined with ethics, governance and norms have grown
remarkably over the last 2-5 years (Larsson et al., 2019).

While our conceptual focus here is on transparency, an important qualifier is AI, which in
combination is highly interrelated to algorithmic transparency. While algorithmic transparency
and algorithmic decision-making have become accepted terminology in contemporary critical
research, we see a need for a more nuanced and elaborated terminology in its relationship to AI
- to be able to clarify the conceptual framing of transparency.

On the one hand, AI indeed is a contested concept that lacks clear consensus, both in computer
science (Monett, Lewis & Thórisson, 2020), law (Martinez, 2019) and the public perception
(Fast & Horvitz, 2017). This is linked to the fact that intelligence alone has been defined in at
least 70 different ways (Legg & Hutter, 2007). Furthermore, the definition has changed as the
possibilities within the field has developed since its inception in the 1950s, posing what
sometimes is called the “AI effect” or an “odd paradox” (discussed by Stone et al., 2016; see also
McCorduck & Cfe, 2004) in the sense that once a problem seen as needing AI has been solved,
the application ceases to be perceived as intelligent. This corresponds to the view that AI is
about solving problems that computers currently cannot do, and as soon as it is possible for a
computer to solve it, it no longer counts as an AI-problem. So, the hard-to-define field of AI has
fittingly been addressed as not a single technology, but rather “a set of techniques and sub-
disciplines ranging from areas such as speech recognition and computer vision to attention and
memory, to name just a few” (Gasser & Almeida, 2017, p. 59).

On the other hand, there is ambiguity also in the ‘algorithmic’ concept, although it seems far less
problematised in critical research. Firstly, the notion of algorithms in computer science as a
finite step-by-step description on how to solve a particular class of problems – and hence what
‘algorithmic’ transparency would denote – is arguably narrower than how the concept is used in
literature on governance issues, often relating to issues of accountability. For example, a recent
report on “algorithmic transparency” lists seven points of what needs to be addressed. Only one
of these are aimed specifically at algorithms, while the other six deals with issues of data, goals,
outcomes, compliance, influence, and usage (Koene et al., 2019). While all of these aspects are
highly relevant from a governance perspective addressing issues of accountability in relation to
transparency, this also speaks for the ambiguity of the use of “algorithmic” in relation to
transparency. Is it addressing a specific technological aspect or a systemic quality?

In line with this, and in relation to issues of unfair outcomes of algorithmic systems, it is often
concluded that the specific algorithms and the code are very unlikely intended to discriminate in

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Transparency in artificial intelligence

a harmful way (Bodo et al., 2017). The challenge is one of relations between data and
algorithms, emergent properties of the machine learning process, very likely to be unidentifiable
from a review of the code. This also means that it is important to consider the context of the
combination of machine learning algorithms, the underlying training data and the decisions
they inform (Kemper & Kolkman, 2019). So, a key question is for whom the AI-systems or
algorithmic decision-making should be more transparent. This is highlighted in relation to
digital platforms on a global scale (Larsson, 2019), and Kemper and Kolkman (2019) argue for
the need of a “critical audience”. Pasquale (2015, pp. 160-165) has called for “qualitative
transparency”, which Larsson (2018) has interpreted as a need for supervisory authorities to
develop methods for algorithmic governance.

The multitude of aspects combined with the complexity of context leads us to argue for a more
systemic approach, here signified by the AI concept, as a wider notion than ‘algorithmic’ (see.
Doshi-Velez et al., 2017; Floridi et al., 2018). Furthermore, a reason is to strengthen a
conceptual bridge between the fields of research dealing with ‘algorithmic transparency’ and
accountability, on the one hand, and the fields researching AI and challenges of transparency,
albeit in terms of making models more explainable and interpretable, on the other (see Lepri et
al., 2018). Of particular interest, here, is the relationship between transparency and trustworthy
AI, which is a key objective for the European AI strategy from April 2018, which not the least is
emphasised by the subsequent AI HLEG’s ethics guidelines on trustworthy AI (2019) and a
clear part of the “ecosystem of trust” sought for in the Commission’s white paper on AI (2020, p.
9).

Even if research related to transparency in AI, or what we interchangeably call AI transparency,

recently has been claimed to be “in its infancy” (Theodorou, Wortham, & Bryson, 2017) the
theoretical backdrop of transparency is, as mentioned, in itself vast and rather complex.
Therefore, some of that backdrop, with its multidisciplinary and historical connotations of the
concept, will be further addressed in the following section (1). Transparency, we show, comes
with a metaphorical framing we analyse in order to show normative connotations attached to it.
Neighbouring concepts like openness and explainability lead us to propose a categorisation of
aspects of relevance to transparency in AI in Section 2. These are of relevance for the ethical and
legal challenges outlined in Section 3.

1. HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF

TRANSPARENCY
In an essay from 2009, Carolyn Ball analyses the metaphorical content of transparency as it had
developed in the anti-corruption work by NGOs and supranational institutions in the 1990s. She
describes the academic interest seen in publications around transparency terminology.
Consistent with this, a search on ’transparency’ in the Web of Science – which mainly indexes
articles published in international scientific journals – reveals that it is a relatively newfound
concept in the sense that there is a steady increase in the use of the concept from the 1990s
onwards, see Figure 1 below.2

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Transparency in artificial intelligence

Figure 1: ‘Transparency’ as a concept in the Web of Science, 1931-2018.

Transparency has for example, according to Forssbæck and Oxelheim (2015), become a
catchword in the economic-political debate, perhaps particularly in relation to a series of
financial crises in the mid-1990s but also a series of scandals in the early 2000s leading to
heightened interest in corporate governance. The EU's Transparency Directive from 2004 can
be mentioned here. Linking transparency to economic theory, Forssbæck and Oxelheim tie the
concept to the notion of information asymmetries, that is, where one party has more or better
information than the other. This notion is also found in literature on fairness in algorithmic
decision-making (Lepri et al., 2018).

One notable difficulty for theorising transparency, as pointed out by Hansen, Christensen and
Flyverbom (2015, p. 118) has to do with the concept itself, and that it refers to such a wide array
of objects, uses, technologies and practices. This is evident in a bibliometric overview of how the
concept of ‘transparency’ is used in different research areas, see Figure 2 below.

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Transparency in artificial intelligence

Figure 2: ‘Transparency’ use in different research areas, ›1,000 publications, based on Web of
Science journal classification categories.

The richness in the use of ‘transparency’ as a concept, as well as part of the difficulty to define it,
relates to the fact that for some fields transparency denotes the physical property of a material
and its capacity to allow light to pass through it, while in others it is thought of as a “powerful
means towards some desirable social end, for example, holding public officials accountable,
reducing fraud and fighting corruption” (Hansen, Christensen, & Flyverbom, 2015, p. 118).
These different understandings should also be noted in relation to the uses of the concept in
different disciplinary publications, see Figure 2.

THE METAPHORICAL FRAMING OF TRANSPARENCY

The conceptual metaphor knowing is seeing is depicted by Michael Reddy in 1979 (Reddy, 1979;
see Larsson, 2017, p. 32). Reddy described the conduit metaphor system, a systemic set of
mappings from the source domain of physical objects to the target domain of mental operations.
This means that there are common metaphorical mappings for human understanding that
structure aspects of knowledge to the metaphorical use of “seeing”. For example, when we
conceptualise understanding in terms of seeing, which is commonplace, this also follows from a
series of other closely linked expressions or associations that have to do with the condition to see
(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Larsson, 2014). This includes light, brightness, clarity – and
transparency. It is therefore likely hard to avoid this particular metaphorical mapping, thereby
leading to a labelling of transparency linked to the positive labelling of knowledge as something
good to have. That is, the benign conception of transparency relates to a deeper cognitive frame
linked to knowing and understanding. And, conversely, the countering metaphors with negative
connotations relates to being in the dark, perhaps most clearly displayed by the very much

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present ‘black box’ terminology. The link between knowledge and transparency may however be
illusive for particular contexts, as it also can be used for more rhetorical reasons, for example to
deflect regulation (see Crain, 2018, below), or have unintended consequences.

There are a number of neighbouring as well as antonymic concepts of particular relevance for
transparency as it relates to AI, such as ‘explainability’ (as in the research strand xAI), ‘black
box’ (particularly popularised by legal scholar Frank Pasquale in Black Box Society, 2015) and
‘openness’. First of all, the clear metaphoricity of these concepts is relevant in itself for
understanding the role and meaning of the terminology. The conceptual and metaphorical
essence to the concept of transparency, and its theoretical implications is witnessed by Hansen,
Christensen and Flyverbom (2015) as well as Christensen and Cornelissen (2015). Hansen,
Christensen and Flyverbom (2015) address the normative challenge that many contemporary
societal projects generally assume that transparency can effectively steer individual and
collective behaviour towards desirable objectives.

The metaphorical analogy of a physical feature has, as argued by Koivisto (2016), led to that
“transparency has come to denote a modern, surprisingly complex and expanding socio-legal
ideal” – and therefore also has become a normative concept bearing premises that needs to be
highlighted and discussed too. As a result, transparency’s negative connotations are, according
to Koivisto, undertheorised. Ananny and Crawford (2018) revisits these general but
metaphorically based notions of transparency in the context of algorithmic accountability. Their
argument supports the notion of a wider transparency concept than what the narrower
explainability domain focuses. It does so by rather than privileging a type of accountability that
needs to look inside systems, instead hold systems accountable by looking across them: “seeing
them as sociotechnical systems that do not contain complexity but enact complexity by
connecting to and intertwining with assemblages of humans and non-humans” (Ananny &
Crawford, 2018, p. 974). The embodiment of transparency is evident, in the sense that it
structures our thinking. How AI and algorithmic systems are understood has normative effects
on regulatory debates around how to govern AI.

NEIGHBOURING CONCEPTS – OPENNESS AND EXPLAINABILITY

As mentioned, ‘openness’ is tightly linked to transparency. It is a concept often framed with
positive values, portrayed by ‘open data’, ‘open source’, ‘open code’ and ‘open access’ (Larsson,
2017, p. 215-220), as well as ‘open science’ (see Fecher & Friesike, 2014). Transparency in the
sense of ‘open government’ comes with a political framing of empowerment under the notion of
fostering democratic processes (see Ruijer, Grimmelikhuijsen, & Meijer, 2017). ‘Openness’ can
also, for example, take place in a still ongoing battle between content-producing industries –
traditionally relying on intellectual property regulation – and other industries relying on a freer
flow of content, the so-called “openness industries” (Jakobsson, 2012; see Larsson, 2017). A
challenge, addressed by Hansen, Christensen, and Flyverbom (2015) in terms of “transparency
as paradox”, is that also a genuinely well-intended discourse of openness may lead to
unintended consequences. For example, the transparency of social media platforms –
mentioned by Margetts (2011) several years before Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data
for political targeting – has led to new modes of misuses and democratic challenges in
contemporary society (see Bodó, Helberger, & de Vreese, 2017, for a special issue on political
micro-targeting). Corresponding to this, transparency can be used inadvertently or strategically
to produce opacity, as stated by de Laat (2018) in relation to algorithmic decision-making, and
by Forsbæck and Oxelheim (2015) with regards to organisational audit and accountability.
Similarly, a US-focused case study of the data broker industry makes the case that transparency
runs up against “insurmountable structural limitations within the political economy” of this

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particular industry and that transparency as a policy approach is “subsumed by a discourse of

consumer empowerment that has been rendered meaningless in the contemporary environment
of pervasive commercial surveillance” (Crain, 2018, p. 89). That is, there seems to be limitations
in transparency as a policy response for this type of industry, both at a structural level, as well as
a regulatory deflection strategy, at worst only creating “an illusion of reform” (Crain, 2018, p.
89).

In research on AI in computer science the concept of explainability (xAI) represents what could
be called a “model-close” research strand of relevance to transparency in AI (see Lepri et al.,
2018; Ribeiro, Singh, & Guestrin, 2016). XAI is often described as a means to deal with “black
box models” (see Biran & Cotton, 2017; Guidotti et al., 2018) or what de Laat (2018) refers to as
“inherent opacity” (2018). This xAI-notion of transparency is narrower and more algorithmic
model-oriented than for example the necessary transparency (and “explicability”) expressed by
AI HLEG (2019) to achieve an ethically sound and trustworthy AI. However, and as noted by
Mittelstadt, Russell and Wachter (2019), explanations of machine learning models and
predictions can serve many functions and audiences: explanations can be necessary to comply
with relevant legislation (Doshi-Velez et al., 2017), verify and improve the functionality of a
system, and arguably enhance the trust between individuals, subject to a decision, and the
system itself (see Citron & Pasquale, 2014; Hildebrandt & Koops, 2010; Zarsky, 2013).

2. A MULTIDISCIPLINARY NOTION OF TRANSPARENCY

When focusing on transparency in the context of AI, the literature often refers to explainability
with reference to both interpretability as well as trust in the systems (see Ribeiro, Singh, &
Guestrin, 2016). For example, when assessing users’ trust in applied AI, an assumption made in
recent literature (see Miller, 2019) is that the issue of transparency has to take into
consideration how ordinary humans understand explanations, and how they assess their
relationship to a service, product or company. The development of explainable AI is then,
arguably, driven by evidence that many AI applications are not used in practice, partly due to
users lacking trust in them (see Linegang et al., 2006). The following hypothesis is then that by
building more explainable systems, users would be better equipped to understand and thereby
trust the intelligent agents or predictive modelling (Mercado et al., 2016; see also Kopitar, Cilar,
Kocbek, & Stiglic, 2019, for a medical example). Trust and its links to transparency, and its
required conditions, have been studied in many social-scientific disciplines, including law, over
a long period of time. However, research on explainable AI typically does not cite or build on
explanatory frameworks based in social science (Miller, Howe, & Sonenberg, 2017; see also de
Graaf & Malle, 2017). More could be done with regards to this (see Felzmann, Villaronga, Lutz,
& Tamò-Larrieux, 2019, on a “relational” understanding of transparency in AI).

As the opening of the ‘black box’ may bring a number of challenges of a legal, technological and
conceptual nature, suggested by Wachter, Mittelstadt and Russell (2017), the notion of
transparency in AI – as applied on markets and interacting with humans and institutions –
could benefit from a wider definition than the more narrowly defined xAI (see Mittelstadt,
Russell, & Wachter, 2019). Drawing from research in law, the social sciences and the
humanities, the xAI domain could be complemented with a range of aspects of relevance for AI
transparency (argued for in Larsson, 2019), such as:

1. legal aspects of proprietorship, as code and data enters competitive markets (Pasquale,
2015), including trade secrets (Wachter, Mittelstadt, & Russell, 2017); Described by Burrell

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(2016) as an aspect of intentional opacity (de Laat, 2018).

2. the need to avoid abuse, indicating that too much openness in the wrong context may actually
defeat the purpose of an AI-enabled process (Caplan, Donovan, Hanson, & Matthews, 2018;
Miller, 2019). There can be incentives for “gaming the system” – examined by de Laat (2018)
in terms of “perverse effects of disclosure” – affecting everything from trending topics on
Twitter to security issues and welfare distribution.
3. data and algorithm user literacy, indicating that ordinary users’ basic understanding has a
direct effect on transparency in applied AI (Burrell, 2016; Haider & Sundin, 2019). This
relates to educational efforts in improving literacy, for example on ‘computational thinking’
(Heintz, Mannila, & Färnqvist, 2016);
4. the symbols and metaphors used for communication, that is, mathematically founded
algorithms may be dependent on translations to human imaginaries and languages, for
example in automated decisions or user agreements (Larsson, 2017; 2019). As concluded by
Mittelstadt, Russell and Wachter (2019), there is a fundamental distinction between
explainability models and explanations in philosophy and sociology, that is, everyday
explanations for humans are contrastive, selective, and social (Miller, 2017), which is not the
same as the “interpretability” and explainability found in the xAI domain.
5. the complexity of data ecosystems and markets trading in consumer-data have an
unquestionable effect on transparency with regards to the obscure origins of the underlying
data and how personal data travels (Christl, 2017; Crain, 2018; Larsson, 2018; Pasquale,
2015); This relates to the debate around the search for a “right to an explanation” in the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – by some feared to lead to a “transparency
fallacy” (Edwards & Veale, 2017), and, lastly,
6. the obscuring effects of distributed, personalised outcomes that create challenges not the
least for supervisory agencies with limited access and overview attempting to detect structural
discrimination or other unfair outcomes (Larsson, 2018; see Larsson et al., 2019).

In this wider notion of transparency in AI, a key challenge from a governance perspective – as
AI is applied and interacting with users, consumers and citizens – is arguably to find an
appropriate balance between legitimate but not necessarily compatible interests. For example,
as noted in the first draft of ethics guidelines from HLEG, there might be “fundamental tensions
between different objectives (transparency can open the door to misuse; identifying and
correcting bias might contrast with privacy protections)” (AI HLEG, 2018, p. 6). Thus, the
interplay between AI technologies and societal values – the applied ethics, social and legal
norms – underscores the importance of combining social scientific and contributions from the
humanities to computer scientifically based AI research (see Dignum, 2019). This is an
argument in line with what Rahwan (2018) has emphasised in terms of a need to keep society
“in-the-loop” in order to enable such balances.

3. ETHICAL AND LEGAL RELEVANCE OF

TRANSPARENCY IN AI
Transparency in AI has increasingly been highlighted in regulatory development, company
policies as well as ethical guidelines over the last few years. For example, the EU adopted a
strategy on AI in April 2018, and appointed the High-Level Expert Group (AI HLEG) mentioned
above to give advice on both investment strategies as well as ethical issues with regards to AI in
Europe. In December 2018, the European Commission presented a coordinated plan – “made in
Europe” – prepared with member states to foster the development and use of AI in Europe. By
mid-2019, all member states were expected to have their own strategies in place, which was not
entirely the case (Van Roy, 2020). The coordinated plan from 2018 included four key areas:
increasing investment, making more data available, fostering talent and ensuring trust. The last
point, on how to ensure trusted, ethically aligned and trustworthy applications and development

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of AI was also in focus for the AI HLEG report published in April 2019. Ethics guidelines as a
tool for AI governance is in line with a global trend (Larsson, forthcoming). Jobin et al. (2019)
mapped and analysed the current corpus of principles and guidelines on ethical AI. They
conclude that of the 84 analysed guidelines, 88% have been published after 2016 and that the
most common concept argued for is ‘transparency’. AI HLEG’s guidelines contain an assessment
list for practical use by companies that was tested by over 350 organisations during the second
half of 2019, and the expert group will finalise a revised version during 2020. According to the
European Commission, a key result of the feedback process is that “while a number of the
requirements are already reflected in existing legal or regulatory regimes, those regarding
transparency, traceability and human oversight are not specifically covered under current
legislation in many economic sectors” (2020, p. 9). Another important mode of governance is
standardisation, which can be seen in how the IEEE has a working group (P7001) for
standardising transparency of autonomous systems, as well as how the international
standardisation body ISO does an overview of ethical and societal concerns in AI (ISO/IEC
JTC1/SC 42 Artificial intelligence).

Hence, the advocacy for the importance of transparency in AI comes in different forms and is
made by different types of stakeholders. While the regulatory field is too rich in relation to
transparency in AI to be thoroughly accounted for here, there are at least three important points
raised in recent literature that may be mentioned. Firstly, and as pointed out by AI HLEG
(2019), important areas are already regulated in the European Union, such as in data protection,
privacy, non-discrimination, consumer protection, and product safety and liability rules.
Secondly, there are specific provisions that are particularly debated, such as the seeming right
for data subjects “to obtain an explanation of the decision reached” where automated processing
(GDPR, Art. 22) is involved (preamble 71). For example, Edwards and Veale (2017) state that the
law is “restrictive, unclear, or even paradoxical concerning when any explanation-related right
can be triggered” (p. 18; see also Felzmann, Villaronga, Lutz & Tamò-Larrieux, 2019; Wachter,
Mittelstadt, & Floridi, 2017). Edwards and Veale (2017) argue that even if it was a clear right
warranted by the GDPR, the legal conception of explanations as “meaningful information about
the logic of processing” may not be provided by the kind of machine learning explanations
computer scientists have developed in response (compare to point 4 above). In addition to data
protection, there are calls for more studies on how administrative law should adapt to more
automated forms of decision-making (e.g., Cobbe, 2019; see also Oswald’s (2018) review of a
number of long-standing rules in English administrative law designed to regulate the
discretionary power of the state). Thirdly, there are fields addressing transparency in AI that will
require legal development, perhaps on ‘algorithmic auditing’ (Casey, Farhangi, & Vogl, 2019) or
risk-adapted requirements (see European Commission, 2020; Datenethikkommission, 2019).
There are also arguments suggesting that some notions in contemporary data protection, to use
an example, might not be well-fitted to current and coming uses of AI and machine learning
abilities to gain insights from large amounts of individuals’ data. Hence, Wachter & Mittelstadt
(2018) argue for a “right to reasonable inferences”.

CONCLUSION
Transparency in AI plays a very important role in the overall strive to develop more trustworthy
AI as applied to markets and in society. It is particularly trust and issues of accountability that
drive the contemporary value of the concept, including the narrower scope of transparency
found in xAI. At the same time, ‘transparency’ has multiple uses in various disciplines, and

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comes with a history from the 1990s. Transparency in AI, or what we interchangeably call AI
transparency, takes a system’s perspective rather than focusing on the individual algorithms or
components used. It is therefore a less ambiguously broad term than algorithmic transparency.
In order to understand transparency in AI as an applied concept, it has to be understood in
context, mitigated by literacies, information asymmetries, “model-close” explainability as well as
a set of competing interests. Transparency in AI, consequently, can best be seen as a balancing
of interests and a governance challenge demanding multidisciplinary development to be
adequately addressed.

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Transparency in artificial intelligence

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FOOTNOTES

1. See for example the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM
FAccT), https://fatconference.org

2. The bibliometric analysis has been assisted by Fredrik Åström, Associate Professor at Lund
University, Sweden.

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