Kevin Baum

Sebastian Biewer, Kevin Baum, Sarah Sterz et al.

This article introduces a framework that is meant to assist in mitigating societal risks that software can pose. Concretely, this encompasses facets of software doping as well as unfairness and discrimination in high-risk decision-making systems. The term software doping refers to software that contains surreptitiously added functionality that is against the interest of the user. A prominent example of software doping are the tampered emission cleaning systems that were found in millions of cars around the world when the diesel emissions scandal surfaced. The first part of this article combines the formal foundations of software doping analysis with established probabilistic falsification techniques to arrive at a black-box analysis technique for identifying undesired effects of software. We apply this technique to emission cleaning systems in diesel cars but also to high-risk systems that evaluate humans in a possibly unfair or discriminating way. We demonstrate how our approach can assist humans-in-the-loop to make better informed and more responsible decisions. This is to promote effective human oversight, which will be a central requirement enforced by the European Union's upcoming AI Act. We complement our technical contribution with a juridically, philosophically, and psychologically informed perspective on the potential problems caused by such systems.

Kevin Baum

Recent advances in AI research make it increasingly plausible that artificial agents with consequential real-world impact will soon operate beyond tightly controlled environments. Ensuring that these agents are not only safe but that they adhere to broader normative expectations is thus an urgent interdisciplinary challenge. Multiple fields -- notably AI Safety, AI Alignment, and Machine Ethics -- claim to contribute to this task. However, the conceptual boundaries and interrelations among these domains remain vague, leaving researchers without clear guidance in positioning their work. To address this meta-challenge, we develop a structured conceptual framework for understanding AI alignment. Rather than focusing solely on alignment goals, we introduce a taxonomy distinguishing the alignment aim (safety, ethicality, legality, etc.), scope (outcome vs. execution), and constituency (individual vs. collective). This structural approach reveals multiple legitimate alignment configurations, providing a foundation for practical and philosophical integration across domains, and clarifying what it might mean for an agent to be aligned all-things-considered.

Markus Langer, Daniel Oster, Timo Speith et al.

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these stakeholders' desiderata) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches.