Rhetorical XAI: Explaining AI's Benefits as well as its Use via Rhetorical Design

TL;DR

The paper reframes Explainable AI (XAI) as a communication and persuasive design problem, arguing that explanations function not only to reveal how AI works but also to justify why AI merits use. It introduces Rhetorical XAI, a framework built on logos, ethos, and pathos to methodically classify and synthesize design strategies across two explanatory goals (how it works and why it merits use). Through a narrative review of 273 papers, the authors map existing XAI designs to rhetorical appeals and present a three-step coding process to connect design strategies with user effects. The work broadens the XAI design space by emphasizing experiential, affective, and context-dependent outcomes, while also discussing ethical considerations and potential misuses. Overall, the framework provides theoretical and practical guidance for crafting explanations that support real-world adoption in diverse sociotechnical contexts.

Abstract

We explore potential benefits of incorporating Rhetorical Design into the design of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems. While XAI is traditionally framed around explaining individual predictions or overall system behavior, explanations may also function as rhetorical arguments that shape how users evaluate a system's usefulness and credibility, and how they develop appropriate trust for adoption. In real-world, in-situ interactions, explanations can thus produce experiential and affective rhetorical effects that are not fully captured by traditional XAI design goals that focus primarily on how AI works. To address this gap, we propose Rhetorical XAI, which bridges two explanatory goals: how AI works and why AI merits use. Rhetorical XAI comprises three appeals in explanation design: logos, which aligns technical logic with human reasoning through visual and textual abstractions; ethos, which establishes contextual credibility based on the explanation source and its appropriateness to the decision task; and pathos, which engages user emotionally by framing explanations around their motivations, expectations, or situated needs during interaction. We conduct a narrative review synthesizing design strategies from prior XAI work aligned with these three rhetorical appeals, highlighting both opportunities and challenges of integrating rhetorical design into XAI.