Conceptual analysis demonstrates that explainability is not required for appropriate trust in artificial intelligence, suggesting that demands for explainable models may be misplaced.
There has been a surge of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). It is commonly claimed that explainability is necessary for trust in AI, and that this is why we need it. In this paper, I argue that for some notions of trust it is plausible that explainability is indeed a necessary condition. But that these kinds of trust are not appropriate for AI. For notions of trust that are appropriate for AI, explainability is not a necessary condition. I thus conclude that explainability is not necessary for trust in AI that matters.
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Sam Baron (2025) studied this question.
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