Q&A: Neural transparency and the future of AI design

Millions of people are now designing their own personalized artificial intelligence companions, yet most have little idea how those creations will actually behave. In a new paper, MIT Media Lab Assistant Professor Pat Pataranutaporn and his graduate student researchers Anthony Baez and Sheer Karny introduce "neural transparency," a tool that lets everyday users glimpse inside an AI's neural network before their chatbot ever says a word. The work is being presented this week at the ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2026), held in Cyprus.