OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks

Open & Responsible AI licenses ("OpenRAIL") are AI-specific licenses enabling open access, use and distribution of AI artifacts while requiring a responsible use of the latter. OpenRAIL licenses could be for open and responsible ML what current open software licenses are to code and Creative Commons to general content: a widespread community licensing tool.

Advances in machine learning and other AI-related areas have flourished these past years partly thanks to the ubiquity of the open source culture in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, which has permeated into ML research and development dynamics. Notwithstanding the benefits of openness as a core value for innovation in the field, (not so already) recent events related to the ethical and socio-economic concerns of development and use of machine learning models have spread a clear message: Openness is not enough. Closed systems are not the answer though, as the problem persists under the opacity of firms' private AI development processes.

Open source licenses do not fit all

Access, development and use of ML models is highly influenced by open source licensing schemes. For instance, ML developers might colloquially refer to "open sourcing a model" when they make its weights available by attaching an official open source license, or any other open software or content license such as Creative Commons. This begs the question: why do they do it? Are ML artifacts and source code really that similar? Do they share enough from a technical perspective that private governance mechanisms (e.g. open source licenses) designed for source code should also govern the development and use of ML models?

Most current model developers seem to think so, as the majority of openly released models have an open source license (e.g., Apache 2.0). See for instance the Hugging Face Model Hub and Muñoz Ferrandis & Duque Lizarralde (2022).

A change of licensing paradigm: OpenRAIL

Author: Carlos Muñoz Ferrandis