What is Transparency in AI?
What does it mean for a machine learning algorithm to be “transparent”?
Published in
3 min readMay 20, 2020
When looking at fair and ethical algorithms, transparency is a key concept often brought up in discussion. But what exactly does it mean for a machine learning algorithm to be “transparent”?
Like “fairness” and “privacy”, it sounds important and useful, but the concept of transparency is quite ambiguous and is worth exploring in more detail.
Definition
When we seek transparent algorithms, we are asking for an understandable explanation of how it works. For example:
- What is the algorithm doing?
- Why is it outputting this particular decision?
- How did it know to do this?
Types of Transparency
Have you ever read an article or watched a lecture that made no sense to you, but made complete sense to your friend/classmate? Likewise, a machine learning system might be understandable to one person, but not another. Thus, we need to consider multiple parties:
- The developer who builds the system
- The deployer who owns and releases the system to the public
- The user of the system
