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Wow! I admit it never occurred to me that what I think of as a reasonably common word has such a short history.

You, like me, no doubt remember the old days when people were translating computer terms like "mouse" and "folder" for the first time. I tried really hard to get Apple Japan to use more familiar terms instead of throwing katakana at everything, but the locals had no interest and insisted that katakana was necessary because there is no direct translation (e.g. ネズミ was obviously wrong, they insisted, since it referred to an animal). I bet it was the same thought process when the first 19th century translators tried to think of equivalents for a word like "accountable" or "responsible". They probably assumed that the nuances were such no direct Japanese term would do.

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Fascinating! I saw this word in a presentation from Adobe the other day about their Firefly AI art generation service. It had a section titled 「AI倫理に配慮」which listed three things:

説明責任

ダイバーシティ

無意識バイアス

説明責任 seemed out of place in this list. Responsibility for... explaining? This makes more sense now!

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