Transparency: Motivations and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper surveys the motivations, benefits, and challenges of transparency in intelligent systems, emphasizing context-dependent effects and potential harms across various domains like privacy, fairness, and trust.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive overview of transparency's motivations, challenges, and potential negative impacts, highlighting the complexity of implementing transparency in real-world systems.

Findings

Transparency motivations vary by context

Transparency can sometimes cause harm or unintended consequences

Connections exist between transparency and privacy, fairness, trust

Abstract

Transparency is often deemed critical to enable effective real-world deployment of intelligent systems. Yet the motivations for and benefits of different types of transparency can vary significantly depending on context, and objective measurement criteria are difficult to identify. We provide a brief survey, suggesting challenges and related concerns. We highlight and review settings where transparency may cause harm, discussing connections across privacy, multi-agent game theory, economics, fairness and trust.