The Tower of Babel in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

As machine learning (ML) has emerged as the predominant technological paradigm for artificial intelligence (AI), complex black box models such as GPT-4 have gained widespread adoption. Concurrently, explainable AI (XAI) has risen in significance as a counterbalancing force. But the rapid expansion of this research domain has led to a proliferation of terminology and an array of diverse definitions, making it increasingly challenging to maintain coherence. This confusion of languages also stems from the plethora of different perspectives on XAI, e.g. ethics, law, standardization and computer science. This situation threatens to create a “tower of Babel” effect, whereby a multitude of languages impedes the establishment of a common (scientific) ground. In response, this paper first maps different vocabularies, used in ethics, law and standardization. It shows that despite a quest for standardized, uniform XAI definitions, there is still a confusion of languages. Drawing lessons from these viewpoints, it subsequently proposes a methodology for identifying a unified lexicon from a scientific standpoint. This could aid the scientific community in presenting a more unified front to better influence ongoing definition efforts in law and standardization, often without enough scientific representation, which will shape the nature of AI and XAI in the future.