Trust attributes and safeguards
The qualities systems must show and the artifacts and controls that prove or protect them. Reliability is consistency over time; robustness is resilience under stress - and a model card documents one model while a system card documents the assembled whole.
The final cluster pairs the qualities trustworthy systems must show with the artifacts and controls that prove or protect them.
- Fairness → outputs free from unjustified differential treatment or impact across individuals and groups.
- Safety → the system avoids physical, psychological or societal harm under intended and foreseeable use.
- Fail-safe plans → predefined mechanisms moving a failing system to a safe state (shutdown, fallback, human takeover).
- Watermarking → embedding detectable markers in AI-generated content to signal synthetic origin and provenance.
- Open-source software → publicly available source code to use, modify and distribute under licence; open weights raise their own governance questions.
Reliability = consistency over time in normal conditions. Robustness = resilience under stress - noisy, unexpected, adversarial or shifting inputs. Same correct answer every day is reliability; still correct under attack is robustness.
A Model card documents one model (purpose, data, versions, metrics, bias and explainability reports, evaluation across demographics). A System card documents the whole assembled multi-component system and its end-to-end behaviour.
Automated decision-making (ADM) is decisions made by technological means without meaningful human involvement - GDPR Article 22 territory, the opposite of human-in-the-loop design.
The exam plants its distractors on eight pairs - learn the one-line discriminator for each: explainability vs interpretability (why vs how), misinformation vs disinformation (intent), overfitting vs underfitting (memorised vs too simple), model card vs system card (one model vs assembled system), data drift vs data poisoning (natural change vs attacker), generative vs discriminative (creates vs draws the boundary), reliability vs robustness (consistency vs stress), training vs validation vs input data (teaches vs tunes vs receives).
Key terms - quick answers
What is “Fairness”?
What is “Safety”?
What is “Reliability”?
What is “Robustness”?
Sources and study method
This independent lesson uses active recall, spaced retrieval and scenario practice. Read the full study method.