Contesting Black-Box AI Decisions

Virginia Dignum (Umeå University), Loizos Michael (Open University of Cyprus & CYENS Center of Excellence), Juan Carlos Nieves (Umeå University), Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen), Julliett Suarez (University of Granada), Andreas Theodorou (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

Abstract

The "right to contest" decisions that have consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Contesting a decision is not a matter of simply providing an explanation, but rather of assessing whether the decision and the explanation are permissible against an organization's governance framework. Yet, albeit the popularity of adjacent fields, little work has been explicitly done on contesting AI decisions. In this paper, we propose that formal argumentation can be used to formulate contestations of decisions made by artificial agents. We extend the discourse on socio-ethical values in AI by conceptualizing our argumentation framework as a formal dialogue, enabling the interaction between humans and agents as decisions are being contested.