Moving from distrust to trust in AI – The Copernican Turn of Regulations

Distrust, conceptualized as the opposite of trust, refers to a lack of willingness to be vulnerable to the trustee (Dwork and Minow, 2022 ; Hamm, 2024). A growing initial distrust in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has been shown to interfere with trust formation in AI and its adoption in a number of critical sectors (Pew Research Centre, 2023). Towards building trust, regulation of AI has been conceived and put forth as a key approach (Laux et al, 2024; European Commission, 2019; European Commission, 2024). Current approaches of regulating AI are based upon understanding regulations as a means to enhance trustworthiness levels of AI in order to facilitate trust formation and enable its uptake. In this paper, I contend that such approach of regulation can be insufficient to move from distrust to trust in AI systems.