Trustworthy AI

The term trustworthy AI is typically used to describe a particularly valuable technological goal. A common thought is that, in order to use artificial intelligence (AI) responsibly, we must deploy only those systems that have been deemed trustworthy. This paper gives reasons to think that trustworthy AI is not the best concept around which to organize our thinking about AI ethics. It shows that, depending on which concept of trust one has in mind, the goal of prioritizing trustworthy AI may be either irresponsible or incoherent. On one interpretation of trust, the proposal that we ought to cultivate trust in AI systems would be irresponsible because it would promote a negligent attitude toward safety. On another interpretation, the proposal that we cultivate trust in AI systems would be incoherent because it relies on the false anthropocentric assumption that AI models have sociocognitive capacities of the sort involved in interpersonal relationships. This dilemma is developed in the “Troubles with Trustworthiness” section.

In response, one might object that dilemma misinterprets the intended meaning of the phrase “trustworthy AI.” In the context of AI ethics, trustworthy just means “confers epistemic justification.” Moreover, insofar as epistemic justification for a belief derives from the judgment of an AI model, the degree of justification can be estimated with quantitative performance metrics, which are themselves free of anthropocentric bias. In the “A Non-Anthropocentric Version of Trust?” section, this objection serves as a jumping off point from which to explore the complex topic of epistemic risk in AI models. The upshot of the discussion is that the justification of AI judgments is importantly different from the justification of human expert judgments. Reliability is a central factor in both cases, but to presume that reliability in AI models carries the same epistemic weight as it does in the case of human judgment is to ignore what this paper dubs the strange error associated with machine learning (ML) classification problems.

Finally, the paper argues that the existence of strange error implies that we will encounter risks that no one can be expected to have anticipated. From this, it follows that there can be harm for which no one can be blamed. The existence of strange errors gives us reason to think that, in the domain of ML judgments, standard practices of assessing culpability will be inadequate, unless and until we develop a general theory of ML artifacts that will enable us to actively mitigate strange error and associated risks. In light of this current inadequacy, the paper argues that a morally appropriate response to AI error must include schemes for restitution that do not depend on the identification of a blameworthy party. This conclusion has particular resonance in the context of medical AI because medical AI systems are particularly disposed to cause harm.

Troubles with Trustworthiness

The concept of trustworthy AI has become influential in part by virtue of its prominent role in many position papers published by large institutions, including tech companies, think tanks, and the European Union. The document that is perhaps most responsible for pushing the concept into the limelight is entitled “Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI.”Footnote ¹ It is the central position paper on AI ethics published by the High-Level Expert Group of the European Union (HLEG). That document contains many valuable insights and deserves to be widely read. Its value derives largely from the more concrete policy recommendations it makes, many of which can be evaluated independently of the conceptual framework in which they are embedded.

On the conceptual side, the document is somewhat underdeveloped. No definition of trustworthiness is offered. There is also no attempt to explain why trustworthiness is an appropriate concept around which to organize efforts to develop an ethics of AI. Instead, the bulk of the document is concerned with identifying which technical and regulatory strategies are likely to promote the goal of trustworthiness, the meaning of which is presumed to be intuitively accessible. This emphasis on practical goals is understandable, and at least partially defensible. The document is not, after all, meant to be read as a philosophical treatise. However, the lack of attention to conceptual precision does have an influence on the reasoning that underlies the practical recommendations. As the paper argues below, this reasoning fails to take sufficient account of how different ML classification judgments are from human ones, and thereby fails to recognize an important sense in which the epistemic justification associated with ML classification can be weaker than it seems.

The conceptual difficulties underlying that conclusion are quite subtle. Other difficulties are more obvious, and one of them needs to be addressed immediately. It is the fact that the HLEG document is persistently ambiguous about the kind of thing the HLEG regards as a candidate for trustworthiness.

Is it the ML model itself that we should hope to trust? Or is it the broader social system that generates, deploys, and regulates the ML model? The quote above is just one example in which it seems that the authors of the HLEG document suggest that we trust both. They also use the concept of trust univocally, tacitly assuming that trusting a social system for managing a technology is the same thing as trusting the technology itself. However, this assumption is nearly as doubtful as the assumption that trusting a prison system is the same thing as trusting a prisoner. Whatever the best analysis of trustworthiness turns out to be, the properties that make AI technology trustworthy are different from the properties that make the social systems surrounding that technology trustworthy. Here, the primary concern is the technology itself. The question at issue in this paper is: What, if anything, could make the technology itself trustworthy?

Let us begin the analysis of trustworthy AI technology by asking what, in general, trustworthiness is. When someone trusts you to take good care of their car, they not only estimate that the probability that you will take good care of the car is sufficiently high to overcome their scruples, but they also demonstrate a willingness to presume that you want to take care of the car and that your motivation is not exclusively self-interested. On the basis of examples like this, some philosophers have suggested that trustworthy agents must be motivated by prosocial attitudes.Footnote ^3, Footnote ⁴ If the presumption of motivation by prosocial attitudes is conceptually necessary for trust, then the question of whether AI is trustworthy is not compelling. Hardly anyone thinks that present-day AI has the capacity for prosocial motivation.

According to an alternative philosophical analysis, the distinctive feature of trust manifests itself in the effect it has on the parties involved in a relation of trust. On this view, relations of trust are characterized by cooperation-supporting feedback loops. When you trust someone, that person becomes more willing to trust you in return.Footnote ⁵ If trust requires this kind of reciprocity, then the question of which sorts of AI can be trusted is, once again, uncompelling. Present-day AI systems are not capable of trusting a human in any interesting sense, and are certainly not capable of learning to adjust their degree of trust in light of experience. Consequently, there can be no feedback-sustaining mechanism in the case of human relationships with AI.

These brief observations give us some reason to suspect that debates about trust in AI are, as multiple authors have recently warned, uncritically anthropomorphic.Footnote ^6, Footnote ⁷ In a recent article, Mark Ryan divides up existing theories of trust differently than this paper does, but also argues that neither group of theories applies well to AI.Footnote ⁸ According to Ryan, all theories of trust are too anthropomorphic to apply to AI. However, Thi Nguyen has developed a new theory of trust that Ryan overlooks, and Nguyen’s theory is specifically designed to apply to technological artifacts. Might Nguyen’s theory overcome the charge of anthropomorphism and offer us an appropriate way to think about trustworthy AI?

Nguyen says that trust is an unquestioning attitude. When we trust a person, we adopt the policy that confirming what they say is unnecessary. We do not need to waste cognitive effort on convincing ourselves that the person is speaking the truth. When we trust an artifact, we do something similar: We rely on the artifact, but waste no conscious effort on verifying that it is doing what it should. Nguyen’s discussion focuses on the sorts of artifacts involved in action, such as the sort of rope used in rock climbing. In that context, to trust the rope is to ignore that it is there at all, and instead, to focus entirely on the execution of appropriate bodily movement. Nguyen’s view of trust is not weighed down by anthropomorphic implications. Nevertheless, even on his artifact-centric view, trustworthiness is not the kind of thing we should want from AI systems because it should not be our goal to build a relationship with AI systems in which we can simply ignore what they do. This is especially clear in examples of ML systems that categorize people and their preferences. It is now widely appreciated that the use of such systems can regiment and reinforce pre-existing social biases.Footnote ^9, Footnote ¹⁰ It is consequently unlikely that we will ever have the ethical luxury of being able to ignore the workings of AI systems entirely.

One might criticize this dismissal of Nguyen’s view by saying that it fails to properly imagine how it should be applied in the case of AI, where the agent who judges whether a technology is trustworthy is not an individual, as it is in the case of the rock climbing rope, but instead a group of humans, or perhaps an entire society. To respond to this criticism, one can appeal to a simplifying assumption, which says that if a technology deserves to be regarded as trustworthy by an entire society, then it deserves to be regarded as trustworthy by at least one person in that society. In particular, it ought to be trustworthy for a person who is directly involved in making choices about the deployment or regulation of AI. No one who is directly involved in making choices about the deployment or regulation of AI has right to ignore it, or its likely effects. As a result, Nguyen’s analysis is not a good candidate for fleshing out the concept of trustworthy AI, even when we presume that the agent making the judgment of trustworthiness is an entire society.

There is another sense in which Nguyen’s analysis of trust might be relevant to AI. Even if everyone on the planet is engaged with AI in some sense, not everyone will be involved in its regulation. We want a world in which most of those people, most of the time, can trust the system of AI regulation, in Nguyen’s sense: They can ignore it and get on with their lives. This proposal is entirely compatible with the view developed in this paper. Notice, however, that it does not involve an assessment of the trustworthiness of the technology itself. It is tantamount to an admission that AI technology is not a candidate for trustworthiness. Rather than placing trust in the technology, we must hope to cultivate trust in the social infrastructure that manages the technology. As mentioned at the outset of this section, the concern in this paper is the technology itself, rather than the social infrastructure in which it is embedded. This proposal, therefore, is entirely compatible with skepticism about the concept of trustworthy AI.

If the foregoing considerations are right, then trustworthiness does not seem particularly suitable to guide our dealings with AI. The suggestion that we should cultivate trust in AI either rests on the false assumption that AI systems have human capacities for social cognition, and is, therefore, an incoherent goal, or it turns out to be dangerously uncritical.

A Non-Anthropocentric Version of Trust?

Strange Error

Thus far, the central claim has been that trustworthy AI is not the goal around which efforts at developing AI ethics ought to be centered. At this point, it might be tempting to say that it would be better to cultivate an attitude of distrust toward AI models. However, that recommendation is equally anthropocentric, and equally mistaken. What is needed instead is a careful and rigorous approach to error analysis. In this section, it is shown that the kinds of errors described in the last section make analysis unusually tricky, in a way that will have consequences for ethical reasoning about the use of AI. To develop this line of thinking, the concept of strange error will be introduced. The concept of strange error is similar to, but not identical to, the concept of adversarial examples.

Our definition of strange error is as follows: Strange errors are errors that (1) result from perturbations to the input data that are either unnoticeable to humans, or otherwise strike them as irrelevant to the classification task, and (2) would strike humans as radically incorrect, if they knew the ground truth.

Let us call the first property subtlety and the second property radicality. Adversarial examples (as they are typically understood) are also subtle, but need not be radical. Moreover, whereas adversarial examples are, by definition, intentionally engineered to produce classification errors, strange errors need not be produced by intentionally engineered perturbations to the input data. They can also occur accidentally. A good example of this comes from the ImageNet data set. ImageNet is an enormous database of images, most of which are scraped from the Internet. CNNs are often trained with ImageNet data and can generally perform very well on it. However, there is a subset of the ImageNet database called ImageNet-A, which is constituted by a subset of ImageNet images that were painstakingly selected by hand precisely because they generate radical errors (Figure 1).Footnote ²⁰

Figure 1

Examples of naturally occurring images that prompt radical errors when given as input to ResNet-50, a standard convolutional neural network. The horizontal black labels refer to the correct label. The red labels refer to the highest probability classification by ResNet-50. ImageNet-O is another subset of ImageNet, selected according to slightly different parameters than ImageNet-A. Taken, with permission, from Hendrycks et al. 2021 (see note 20).

How much do we need to be worried about strange errors in medicine? Some prominent examples of medical AI involve binary judgments about the presence or absence of a disease. In such cases, it is not at all clear that a mistake can be radical. However, medical AI is increasingly used on multiclass classification problems, in which many labels are possible for each datapoint. In multiclass classification problems, the space of possible answers is large, and consequently contains room enough for radical errors to crop up. Imagine an AI tasked with diagnosing neurological problems. It is trained with supervised learning on imaging data to identify hundreds of possible neurological problems. In such a case, there are as many possible labels as there are diseases. Imagine, furthermore, that someone is suffering from a brain tumor, but that a medical AI, as a result of some inscrutable pattern in the input data, gives a diagnosis of meningitis. That would be an example of a strange error in medicine. Moreover, medical AI is not restricted to image processing. Natural language processing on electronic health records is also being used to predict the probability of an open-ended list of medical problems.Footnote ²¹ In these cases, radical errors are to be expected.

The problem of strange errors in medicine is reinforced by considerations regarding the medical infrastructure in which ML models are used. Finlayson et al. argue that, because medical data are balkanized, and because hospital infrastructure is hard to update, medical AI is acutely and increasingly susceptible to adversarial attacks, some of which will produce strange errors in our sense.Footnote ²² If Finlayson et al. are right, medical AI will be confronted with many strange errors in coming years. This fact fortifies the argument in the previous section because, in a regime in which strange errors are common, quantitative error profiles will be a particularly impoverished guide to epistemic justification.

Is there anything we can do defend medical AI against the risk of strange errors? Cameron Buckner argues that, in order to understand adversarial examples, we need a theory of artifacts in deep learning.Footnote ²³ Buckner’s argument can readily extended to strange errors in our sense. If we had a theory about the patterns in input data that tend to generate strange errors, we could work to anticipate particular kinds of strange errors, and thereby mitigate associated risks. Thus far, however, and despite a surge in recent literature on strategies for defense against adversarial attack, there does not yet appear to be any general algorithmic solution to the problem.

Culpability and Complexity

Thus far, the concept of strange error has been defined, but nothing has yet been said anything about the concept of risk. We use the term “risk” in its informal sense, rather than in its decision-theoretic one. According to the informal sense of the term, risk can be contrasted with uncertainty along a dimension of objectivity. Uncertainty has a subjective connotation, whereas risk has an objective one. Consider the following example from Sven Hanson. You see a snake in the grass, which you suspect may be poisonous. In fact, it is not. You are then uncertain about the snake’s ability to poison you, but you are not actually at risk of being poisoned.Footnote ²⁴ The objective connotation of the term “risk” is appropriate for present purposes because one can be in position to know that a model is disposed to make strange errors, despite the fact that, precisely because they are strange, one cannot know much about what they will look like when they do crop up.

Risk is, therefore, an epistemic situation in which one knows that the model on which our beliefs are based is disposed to make errors, and the consequences of these errors might be severe. Notice that this definition does not exclude the possibility of non-strange errors. Typically, the users of an ML system will be faced with both strange and non-strange errors. With respect to the non-strange errors, the usual decision-making practices are applicable. One could, for example, resort to normal cost–benefit analysis.

It is now time to turn to the question of how strange risk influences moral culpability. Culpability is the condition in which a person or other agent is subject to judgments of praise and blame. Are the engineers who build an ML system culpable for its errors? According to most philosophical analyses of culpability, it involves an awareness condition. That is, you must be aware of both the probable consequences of your action and the fact that those consequences have moral significance. One must then ask: Are the engineers who build ML systems aware of the errors their models are likely to make, and of their moral significance? If the model is disposed to make strange errors, then the answer is “no.” As was argued in the “A Non-Anthropocentric Version of Trust?” section, neither the nature nor the magnitude of strange errors can be systematically anticipated.

Why exactly can you not anticipate the nature and magnitude of strange errors? Recall that one of the two defining properties of strange errors is radicality and that radical errors are possible only when the space of possible classifications is large. Strange errors occur because humans conceptualize that space differently from machines. For humans, two classifications in that space are close together if they are similar to one another (elephant and hippopotamus). The similarity gradient is, of course, a function of our own psychology. ML systems might replicate that similarity gradient under some conditions,Footnote ²⁵ but this is not something one can expect in general. Strange errors occur when an ML model orders some subspace of classifications very differently, such that what counts as a highly probable second-best classification for us is radically different from what counts as a highly probable second-best classification for the ML model (cube and hippopotamus).

It is this difference in the way humans and machines order conceptual space that gives rise to the radicality property. On its own, the radicality property makes anticipating the nature and magnitude of strange errors difficult. Once we take the subtlety property into account, the prospects for anticipating the nature and magnitude of strange errors decline further. To say that strange error is subtle is to say that human perceptual judgments cannot easily identify the input conditions under which such radical mistakes are likely to occur. Together, these facts make it practically (if not logically) impossible to anticipate the nature and magnitude of strange errors.

It is nearly a platitude in technical articles on AI ethics that ML models are subject to unknown failure modes which appear only after deployment. In other words, unpredictable mistakes occur once the model is applied to real-world data. The concept of strange error helps refine this idea and helps clarify its ethical consequences. When reasoning about the ethics of these unknown failure modes, one must ask why the failure mode was unknown, and whether it could have been known before deployment. These questions are important because, unless they are answered, it will be impossible to say who, if anyone, is culpable for the error. Considering the discussion of strange error, one can say that the nature and magnitude of the errors could not have been anticipated. Moreover, the practical impossibility of anticipating these factors does not stem from the cognitive limitations of any particular personFootnote ²⁶ or group. Unless and until we have a theory of ML artifacts, of the sort Cameron Buckner calls for, there exists neither person nor group that can be expected to have anticipated the nature and magnitude of strange errors.

One positive proposal worth considering, which is pre-figured in Paul Humphreys’ talk, is to impose something like a strangeness-limiting mechanism in the deployment of medical AI. Humphreys suggests an idea along these lines as an amendment to traditional reliabilism, in order to make it more appropriate for an age in which scientific work relies heavily on ML techniques. Epistemology and ethics have been closely linked not only since the introduction of AI. It is, therefore, not difficult to convert Humphrey’s theoretical suggestion into a practical one. His suggestion is that we develop an explicit measure of strangeness, which we extrapolate from subjective judgments of similarity, and then use that explicit measure to delimit the space of models that count as epistemically reliable. More precisely, where g is the function that describes the input–output mapping of an ML model, and X is the input for that model, we insist that there exists no X such that g(X) is farther from an accurate representation of the input data than δ. Here, δ refers to a conventional threshold within the similarity space, which itself is derived from collective judgments of the relevant scientific community. The ethical variant of this epistemological criterion is to say that we must only deploy ML models that meet this strangeness-limiting constraint. This is because risks can be minimized in this way and, in particular, the danger of serious harm from medical AI systems can be avoided.

This strangeness-limiting constraint has intuitive appeal, but faces at least two difficulties. First, although it is perfectly coherent to say that a model confers justification only if the strangeness of its judgments is bounded, one can never be in position to know with certainty that the strangeness of its judgments is bounded. In other words, one can never be in position to know that there exists no input X such that g(X) is farther from accuracy than δ. This is because any such claim would be based on inductive inference from a limited sample, and inductive inference is inherently risky. In a practical setting, the best one can do is to say that no judgments have yet been observed that exhibit a degree of strangeness greater than δ, despite having tested the model on many data sets. It is unclear whether this suggestion amounts to a different strategy than the one we already follow. We try to test our ML models rigorously, but, nevertheless, they continue to surprise us with the occasional strange error.

The other difficulty is that, if, contrary to the deflationary reaction expressed in the previous paragraph, we do end up ruling out a substantial number of ML models because they fail to satisfy our strangeness-limiting constraint, we would almost certainly end up discarding models that are accurate and strange for those that are non-strange, but also less accurate. This kind of trade-off is difficult to justify in cases where accuracy has greater influence on the net utility of medical judgment than does the absence of strangeness. It seems, therefore, that, unless and until we have a rigorous theory of ML artifacts of the sort Cameron Buckner envisions, we will have to live with strange errors and the resulting risks.

The argument of this section has been that the people who would otherwise be culpable for the negative consequences of AI error are not, in fact, culpable because they cannot have known the nature and magnitude of the errors involved. A natural response to this claim is that ignorance does not always undermine culpability. In some circumstances, a person may be culpable for a negative outcome even if they were ignorant of the possibility of that outcome. Ignorant culpability, as it is sometimes called, can occur when the person neglected to undertake some action that would have relieved them of their ignorance. Following Smith,Footnote ²⁷ we can refer to such neglected knowledge gathering activities as benighting omissions. Under strange risk, there are no benighting omissions. Absent a systematic theory of adversarial examples, there is nothing one could have done to gather knowledge of the nature and magnitude of strange errors.

From this, we conclude that the primary pathway by which ignorance leads to culpability is blocked under conditions of strange risk. Must we therefore give up on the notion of culpability altogether when operating on the basis of ML judgments? This view has been advocated by the so-called “fatalist” camp in discussions of responsibility gaps generated by ML technology,Footnote ²⁸ and is exemplified by the original paper on responsibility gaps.Footnote ²⁹ However, there are at least two reasons to look for a more nuanced position.

First, not all errors are strange. Even if an ML model is epistemically opaque, and therefore generates behavior that is resistant to mechanistic explanation, you can still study its behavior, and look out for worrisome patterns. This is indeed what you have to do when you construct the quantitative error profile of the model. If your error analysis is not thorough, or if you do not allow that analysis to constrain your choices about how to deploy your model appropriately, you bear some culpability for whatever non-strange errors that do crop up.

Second, even if you cannot predict the nature and magnitude of model errors, you can still say something about them. Even in the case of strange errors, you can study the model’s quantitative error profile. Moreover, once you have read this paper and know that strange errors occur, you can incorporate that knowledge into your risk analysis. You are then culpable for taking appropriate account of your own second-order uncertainty about the nature and magnitude of the errors your model will make.

In the medical context, this means that software engineers as well as physicians and operators of medical facilities using AI will have to grapple with the existence of strange errors. In the future, informed consent may even need to involve information about strange error. Of course, it will be an (additional) challenge to communicate this concept to lay people. Patients need to know what they are getting into when AI is used in medicine. Only then can they decide for themselves whether they want to use this technology or not. If the problem of strange errors is concealed, then developers, operators, and users are culpable if harm occurs that patients could not have foreseen.

For these reasons, it is unwise to make any absolutist claims about culpability in the domain of AI. Nevertheless, there is no denying that ML in general, and strange error in particular, make it rather difficult to say who is culpable for what. On top of the fact that strange errors make it practically impossible to anticipate the nature and magnitude of error, it is also the case that AI models are not constructed by a single person. In medical cases, they are not even constructed by a single institution. As Finlayson et al. note, most neural network models used in medical AI are developed by some AI company or research group for general classification tasks, and then adopted and fine-tuned by an independent group for medical applications. Medical AI is, therefore, particularly susceptible to the so-called many-hands problem, according to which liability cannot be pinned to any particular person. Given the combination of strange error and the many-hands problem, it would be wise to explore options for restitution that do not depend on identifying a culpable party, but this should be done in parallel to attempts to assess culpability, and to hold bad actors liable. Strange error makes culpability assessment more complex, and less certain, but cannot undermine it altogether.

Although we prefer to speak of “culpability,” rather than the more general notion of “responsibility” in this context, the conclusion that has just been drawn does entail a view about responsibility gaps. According to the view defended here, it is unlikely that responsibility gaps will be generated in which no one has any culpability for harm. However, the view here is also compatible with John Danaher’s proposal that ML models may generate what he calls a retribution gap.Footnote ³⁰ A retribution gap is a situation in which the victim of some harm wants retribution, but cannot identify any particular party deserving of that retribution. Danaher may well be right that, as ML systems become enmeshed in our practical life, harms will appear for which retribution is not a coherent goal. As we learn to live with strange errors and risks resulting from them, we may be compelled to give up some of our retributive habits, even if we retain the capacity to ascertain various kinds of culpability.