Invisible State
The system has internal state that affects behavior but is not exposed to the user.
Invisible State goes beyond opacity about decisions — it's opacity about what the system currently knows and believes. The model has internal representations, accumulated context, and implicit assumptions that influence every response, but the user can't see any of it. This means the user can't diagnose why the system is behaving a certain way. If the model is producing unexpected output, is it because of something in the current prompt, something in the conversation history, something in the system prompt, or some internal state the user has no access to?
More in System Transparency
System Opacity
The inability to see what an AI system knows, why it made a decision, or what it did. The default state of most AI tools today.
Decision Fog
The user can see the output but not the reasoning, trade-offs, or alternatives the model considered.
Black Box Agency
An agent that acts on your behalf but won't show its work. You get results with no audit trail.
Accountability Gap
No one — human or system — can explain why a specific output was produced.
Reasoning Visibility
The user can inspect the model's chain of thought, assumptions, and decision points.
Decision Traceability
Every output can be traced back through the reasoning, context, and data that produced it.
Open State
The system's internal state is visible and inspectable at any time. The opposite of Invisible State.
Audit Trail
A complete, immutable record of what the system did, when, why, and with what inputs.