Leading international researchers in the field of ethics of explainable AI will come together at Paderborn University in mid-May. The workshop "Ethics And Normativity of Explainable AI", organized by project B06 of the TRR 318, will take place from May 15 to 17. The increasing spread of AI systems and their use in decision-making processes, which affect people in countless contexts and everyday situations, provides a current framework for the workshop's topics.
Explanations are not per se helpful or wanted, they can also be a burden. “Explanations are not of absolute but of instrumental value. For the field of explainable AI, it is crucial to determine when and for whom which explanation will most likely be valuable and when not. explains Professor Dr Tobias Matzner, co-organizer of the workshop. This normativity of explanations can generally be understood from an economic perspective (efficiency, convenience), from a social perspective (roles, constellations, contexts, stakeholder interests) and from an ethical-political perspective (duties, tasks, virtues, effects of (not) explaining). "The workshop serves to sort out these different normative expectations and implications and link them to the task of value-oriented technology design," says Matzner.
Co-organizer Professor Dr. Suzana Alpsancar explains: "Explaining AI is not automatically a good thing. In the worst case, explanations can be used to manipulate users or create acceptance for a technology that is ethically or legally unacceptable. Therefore, research on explaining and explainability needs ethical reflection."
The workshop provides the impetus for this discussion and focuses on three different topics spread over three workshop days. On the first day, the need for explainable AI (XAI) will be critically evaluated. The following days will focus on the epistemic and normative dimensions of explainable AI as well as concrete use cases of XAI.
The internationally renowned keynote speakers, Andrea Aller Tubella (Umeå University, Sweden), Assistant Professor Elettra Bietti (Northeastern University, USA) and Professor Dr. Reinhold Häb-Umbach (Paderborn, Germany) will provide exciting impulses for the workshop discussions with their presentations. The workshop is intended to open up a broad spectrum of perspectives from the fields of philosophy of technology, media studies, science and technology studies (STS), law, technology and computer science to participants interested in researching the normativity of XAI.
Interested parties can register for the workshop here.
