Beware of “Explanations” of AI

Understanding the decisions made and actions taken by increasingly complex AI systems remains a key challenge. This has led to an expanding field of research in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), highlighting the potential of explanations to enhance trust, support adoption, and meet regulatory standards. However, the question of what constitutes a “good” explanation is dependent on the goals, stakeholders, and context. At a high level, psychological insights such as the concept of mental model alignment can offer guidance, but success in practice is challenging due to social and technical factors. As a result of this ill-defined nature of the problem, explanations can be of poor quality (e.g., unfaithful, irrelevant, or incoherent), potentially leading to substantial risks. Instead of fostering trust and safety, poorly designed explanations can actually cause harm due to wrong decisions, privacy violations, manipulation, and reduced AI adoption. Therefore, we caution stakeholders to beware of explanations of AI: While they can be vital, they are not automatically a remedy for transparency or responsible AI adoption, and their misuse or limitations can exacerbate harm. Attention to these caveats can help guide future research to improve the quality and impact of AI explanations.