right to explanation

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a legal concept and proposed right by which individuals affected by automated or algorithmic decisions are entitled to receive a meaningful explanation of how and why that decision was reached, enabling them to understand, challenge, and seek correction of decisions that harm their interests; the right to explanation has been read into the EU General Data Protection Regulation's provisions on automated decision-making, though the precise scope and legal enforceability of such a right remain contested among legal scholars; a meaningful explanation should enable a non-specialist to understand the key factors that drove a decision, any data relied upon, and the degree to which human judgement was involved; critics argue that the complexity of modern machine learning models makes genuine post-hoc explanation technically impossible and that apparent explanations may themselves be misleading simplifications of processes too complex for human comprehension