Ethics and Society Newsletter #3: Ethical Openness at Hugging Face

Mission: Open and Good ML

In our mission to democratize good machine learning (ML), we examine how supporting ML community work also empowers examining and preventing possible harms. Open development and science decentralizes power so that many people can collectively work on AI that reflects their needs and values. While openness enables broader perspectives to contribute to research and AI overall, it faces the tension of less risk control.

Moderating ML artifacts presents unique challenges due to the dynamic and rapidly evolving nature of these systems. In fact, as ML models become more advanced and capable of producing increasingly diverse content, the potential for harmful or unintended outputs grows, necessitating the development of robust moderation and evaluation strategies. Moreover, the complexity of ML models and the vast amounts of data they process exacerbate the challenge of identifying and addressing potential biases and ethical concerns.

As hosts, we recognize the responsibility that comes with potentially amplifying harm to our users and the world more broadly. Often these harms disparately impact minority communities in a context-dependent manner. We have taken the approach of analyzing the tensions in play for each context, open to discussion across the company and Hugging Face community. While many models can amplify harm, especially discriminatory content, we are taking a series of steps to identify highest risk models and what action to take. Importantly, active perspectives from many backgrounds is key to understanding, measuring, and mitigating potential harms that affect different groups of people.

We are crafting tools and safeguards in addition to improving our documentation practices to ensure open source science empowers individuals and continues to minimize potential harms.

Ethical Categories

Look for these terms as we’ll be using these tags, and updating them based on community contributions, across some new projects on the Hub!