Get Your Act Together: A Comparative View on Transparency in the AI Act and Technology

The European Union has proposed the Artificial Intelligence Act which introduces a proportional risk-based approach to AI regulation including detailed requirements for transparency and explainability. Many of these requirements may be addressed in practice by the field of explainable AI (XAI), however, there are fundamental differences between XAI and the Act regarding what transparency and explainability are. These basic definitions should be aligned to assure that regulation continually translates into appropriate technical practices. To facilitate this alignment, we first give an overview of how XAI and European regulation view basic definitions of transparency with a particular focus on the AI Act and the related General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We then present a comparison of XAI and regulatory approaches to identify the main points that would improve alignment between the fields: clarification of the scope of transparency, the legal status of XAI, oversight issues in conformity assessments, and dataset-related transparency.