Index Errans

person in Black box

Sandra Wachter

Counterfactual explanationAlgorithmic opacity

in Black box

Sandra Wachter, lawyer and scholar of data-protection law, AI ethics, and algorithmic accountability at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute. With Brent Mittelstadt and Chris Russell she wrote Counterfactual Explanations Without Opening the Black Box (2017/2018), and with Mittelstadt and Luciano Floridi the companion argument that the GDPR contains no binding right to explanation.

Stake§

Academic and reform-oriented, funded by public research grants; the work takes a definite legal-technical position that became influential in European AI-regulation debate. No commercial conflict.

Wachter's contribution to this topic is to ask what a usable right to explanation could contain under European data-protection law, and to answer with the counterfactual explanation — the smallest change to a person's data that would have flipped the decision. It is the legal analogue of the post-hoc explanation of LIME, and it supplies the concrete remedy that Pasquale's broader case for transparency leaves open.

Works in this corpus§

their concepts on the territory
Algorithmic opacityAlgorithmic opacity Counterfactual explanationCounterfactual explanation

2 concepts in this scholar's webopen the full territory →

excerpts

explanations can, in principle, be offered without opening the 'black box.' Looking at explanations as a means to help a data subject act rather than merely understand, one could gauge the scope and content of explanations according to the specific goal or action they are intended to support.
— Counterfactual Explanations Without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR (2018)

The legal move that matches the technical one: drop the demand to see inside the model, and ask instead what the person needs in order to act. An [[concept:explainability|explanation]] is judged by the recourse it enables, not by the mechanism it reveals.

on Counterfactual explanation, Explainability

You were denied a loan because your annual income was £30,000. If your income had been £45,000, you would have been offered a loan.
— Counterfactual Explanations Without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR (2018)

A [[concept:counterfactual-explanation|counterfactual explanation]] in one line: the smallest change to the inputs that would have flipped the decision. It tells the subject what to change without disclosing — or even requiring — the model's internals.

on Counterfactual explanation

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