Boosting Human Competences With Interpretable and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming integral to many areas of life, yet many-if not most-AI systems are opaque black boxes. This lack of transparency is a major source of concern, especially in high-stakes settings (e.g., medicine or criminal justice). The field of explainable AI (XAI) addresses this issue by explaining the decisions of opaque AI systems. However, such post hoc explanations are troubling because they cannot be faithful to what the original model computes-otherwise, there would be no need to use that black box model. A promising alternative is simple, inherently interpretable models (e.g., simple decision trees), which can match the performance of opaque AI systems. Because interpretable models represent-by design-faithful explanations of themselves, they empower informed decisions about whether to trust them. We connect research on XAI and inherently interpretable AI with that on behavioral science and boosts for competences. This perspective suggests that both interpretable AI and XAI could boost people's competences to critically evaluate AI systems and their ability to make accurate judgments (e.g., medical diagnoses) in the absence of any AI support. Furthermore, we propose how to empirically assess whether and how AI support fosters such competences. Our theoretical analysis suggests that interpretable AI models are particularly promising and-because of XAI's drawbacks-preferable. Finally, we argue that explaining large language models (LLMs) faces similar challenges as XAI for supervised machine learning and that the gist of our conjectures also holds for LLMs.