Responsible and Explainable AI

- Overview

Responsible AI and explainable AI (XAI) are both approaches to AI that have similar goals, but different perspectives:

• Responsible AI: Focuses on planning stages to ensure AI algorithms are responsible before the results are computed. It includes principles like accountability, transparency, fairness, privacy, and safety. Responsible AI can help businesses mitigate risks and build trust by ensuring AI systems comply with data protection laws and respect user privacy. It can also help ensure that AI abides by the ethics and interests of specific groups, and doesn't harm the interests of others.
• Explainable AI: Focuses on looking at AI results after they are computed. It can help businesses troubleshoot and improve model performance, and help stakeholders understand how AI models behave. Transparency is important for explainable AI, as it helps ensure that AI decisions are understandable and explainable, and that the decisions are fair and unbiased. It also helps people understand how their data is being used by AI systems.

Explainable AI looks at AI results after the results are computed. Responsible AI looks at AI during the planning stages to make the AI algorithm responsible before the results are computed. Explainable and responsible AI can work together to make better AI.

- Trustworthy AI Systems

Trustworthy AI has three components: 

• Lawfulness: Compliant with all applicable laws and regulations
• Ethics: Adheres to ethical principles and values
• Robustness: Both technical and social

Trustworthy AI systems have many characteristics, including:

• Validity and reliability
• Safety, security, and resilience
• Accountability and transparency
• Explainability and interpretability
• Privacy-enhanced
• Fair with harmful bias managed

Some core principles for the ethics of AI include: 

• Proportionality and do no harm
• Safety and security
• Right to privacy and data protection
• Multi-stakeholder and adaptive governance and collaboration
• Responsibility and accountability
• Transparency and explainability

A strong AI code of ethics can include: 

• Avoiding bias
• Ensuring privacy of users and their data
• Mitigating environmental risks

- Responsible AI

Responsible AI is a set of principles that help guide the design, development, deployment, and use of AI and build trust in AI solutions that have the potential to deliver benefits to organizations and their stakeholders support.

Responsible AI involves considering the wider social impacts of AI systems and the measures needed to align these technologies with stakeholder values, legal standards and ethical principles. 

Responsible AI aims to embed such ethical principles into AI applications and workflows to mitigate the risks and negative outcomes associated with the use of AI while maximizing positive outcomes.

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- Explainable AI

Explainable AI (XAI) is a set of methods and processes that helps users understand and trust the results created by machine learning (ML) algorithms. XAI is programmed to explain its rationale, purpose, and decision-making process in a way that the average person can understand. 

XAI can help human users understand the reasoning behind ML algorithms and AI. It can also help users debug and improve model performance, and help others understand the behavior of their models. 

XAI is sometimes referred to as "white box" models. This means that users can understand the rationale behind its decisions. 

XAI is different from the concept of the "black box" in machine learning. In machine learning, even designers cannot explain why the AI arrived at a specific decision. 

In the healthcare domain, researchers have identified explainability as a requirement for AI clinical decision support systems. This is because the ability to interpret system outputs facilitates shared decision-making between medical professionals and patients.

- Responsible AI vs. Explainable AI

Responsible AI is a set of practices that ensure AI systems are designed, deployed, and used ethically and legally. Responsible AI focuses on ethical principles that guide AI development and deployment, ensuring fairness, accountability, and transparency. 

XAI is a set of tools and frameworks that help users understand and interpret predictions made by machine learning models. XAI provides tools to understand the “black box” of complex AI models, making their decision-making processes transparent and interpretable.  

XAI is considered a building block for responsible AI, with most literature considering it as a solution for improved transparency.