AI Governance Engineer
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Opacity

By Updated

The inability of a person to follow how a system reached an output. It has three sources (secrecy, technical illiteracy, and the nature and scale of machine learning) 1, each with a different fix: disclosure, literacy, and explanation methods plus behavioural evals.

Developed in
ch. 11, Eight characteristics that break classic IT governance
ch. 11, Contrast pairs
Chapters
ch. 11, AI Defined
Contrast with
Explainability
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

4 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Catastrophic forgetting

    The tendency of neural networks to lose earlier competence when trained on new tasks.

  • Concept drift

    A change in the relationship between a system's inputs and the correct output, so the same input should now get a different answer.

  • Data drift

    A change in the distribution of the inputs a system sees in production relative to the data it was validated on, such as a new customer segment or a changed…

  • Dual use

    The capacity of the same AI capability to serve harmful ends as well as legitimate ones, for example a toxicity model inverted to propose toxic molecules.

  • Transparency

    In NIST's framing, how far information about an AI system and its outputs reaches the people who interact with it: what happened.

  • Contributing factor

    A property of a system or its context (autonomy, exposure, reversibility, vulnerable groups, data sensitivity, opacity) that moves the likelihood or severity…

  • Machine learning

    The branch of AI in which a system improves at a task by learning patterns from data rather than by following rules people wrote.

Sources

  1. [1] "How the machine thinks: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms" (three forms of opacity; Big Data & Society 3(1)). SAGE (Jenna Burrell). 2016-01-06. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715622512 (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Opacity. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/opacity. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026opacity,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Opacity}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/opacity}
}