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Paper short abstract

This paper explores whether Chilean public authorities using automated decision‑making can truly meet their duty to give reasons, given the structural tension between human legal reasoning and opaque, statistically driven algorithms.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines whether Chilean public authorities that deploy automated decision‑making systems can genuinely satisfy the legal duty to give reasons for administrative acts in a constitutional democracy committed to transparency and accountability. It argues that the growing complexity and opacity of contemporary artificial intelligence architectures create a structural tension between human, causally oriented legal reasoning and statistically driven algorithmic decision‑making that often resists meaningful explanation.

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The paper identifies a fundamental epistemic dissonance between the requirement of rational motivation in administrative law—grounded in the articulation of causal narratives, normative justifications, and publicly accessible reasons—and algorithmic systems that operate through correlations, probabilistic inferences, and high‑dimensional models that are difficult to translate into the language of legal argument. This dissonance becomes more acute as technological sophistication increases: while simple, rule‑based or linear models may allow for relatively clear and auditable explanations, complex machine‑learning systems tend to function as “black boxes,” undermining both citizens’ ability to understand decisions that affect their rights and courts’ capacity to exercise effective judicial review.

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Situated in the Chilean context, the paper engages with recent regulatory developments that recognize a right to an explanation for automated decisions but leave public bodies largely outside the scope of these guarantees. Against this backdrop, the paper contends that the key challenge is not whether the State may use automated systems, but under what conditions such use can be reconciled with the constitutional and administrative law duty to provide reasons that are intelligible, reviewable, and normatively grounded.