Blackbox AI: What is in the Box?

abstract

We present insights from a chatbot prototype for online citizen participation and discuss particular benefits and caveats of artificial intelligence (AI) application in the government domain. We present an argument that AI represents a blackbox not only in terms the reasoning process itself, but also in terms of applying different building blocks “out-of-the-box”. Our research shows that customizing an AI application involves a hardly manageable combination of buildings blocks: various machine learning techniques, data sources and user interaction designs. Since those building blocks might not fit the requirements of a particular use case, the required effort to configure the expected behaviour should not be underestimated.