CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: Facilitating Adoption and Tackling Challenges Ahead

 

The RAIL Initiative was created in 2019 with the goal of promoting the integration of behavioral usage restrictions in licensing processes of AI-related technology and artifacts. This initiative stemmed from concerns about the capabilities and limitations of AI and the potential risks associated with the misuse or blind reliance on these technologies, either due to the actors’ intent or misunderstanding, or due to the technical limitations of the technology. 

Responsible AI Licenses have recently been adopted in the licensing of many large AI models. For instance, Meta released several of its models with a license that could be deemed types of RAILs; Stability.ai released Stable Diffusion with a CreativeML OpenRAIL-M; and BigScience released the BigScience OpenRAIL-M license.  

However, the use of licensing as a mechanism to promote responsible-use, opens up interesting real-world challenges at the intersection of technology, law, open source licensing norms, enforcement norms, software governance and license standardization. This requires a concerted effort by the community in working towards addressing these challenges, and developing a framework that can operate hand-in-hand with other best practices. 

We have spent the last three years working towards some of these goals, including critically examining the weakness of behavioral-use licensing.  For instance, at the 2019 UN AI For Good Summit held in Geneva we discussed how RAIL Licenses could benefit from standardization, at the AAAI Spring Sympoisum in 2020 we held discussions and brainstorming sessions focusing on use-cases and license enforcement norms. In a paper published at ACM FAccT 2022, we highlighted how Responsible AI Licenses could serve as a useful tool for Responsible-use for AI practitioners; and more recently we have been interacting and learning from the Open Source Community including forums hosted by the Open Source Initiative.

We recognize that for RAIL Licenses to be truly useful we need to scale out and build a comprehensive, community-driven approach to developing and improving such licenses. We therefore invite participation from the community  to establish self-organized working groups to help move the discussion forward.  

Working Groups

Based on the feedback we received from community members, we propose three working groups that can benefit from community participation immediately: 1) tooling & procedural governance, 2) licensing & legal, and 3) advocacy and public policy. Below, we specify the mission and possible projects of each working group. We hope these initial ideas can serve as a starting point for interested community members to help shape the RAIL initiative right away. 

Individuals interested in joining RAIL are encouraged to choose one existing working group and collaborate with others in the group to work on existing projects or start new projects. As we are still in the early stage of project planning, we are hoping these working groups can provide the initial structure for members to work in a self-directed, collaborative manner. Each working group may have one or more chairs to lead and coordinate efforts within the group. During our quarterly community meeting, all working groups will be invited to present their progress, challenges, and findings to the broader community.  

As RAIL is meant to be an open, collective, and collaborative endeavor, we are also inviting proposals for new working groups. If you would like to propose one, you can submit your proposal (a brief summary of the group’s aim and possible projects) to the designated Slack channel. We encourage proposal authors to review existing working groups’ projects closely. The RAIL steering committee will review working group proposals regularly and contact participants to discuss next steps.  

Tooling & Procedural Governance Working Group

Aim: The Tooling WG will focus on needed technical and procedural features to help enable wider and smoother adoption of RAILs. As with other open licensing initiatives, such as Open Source or Creative Commons, open licensing frameworks need a set of procedural norms and features clarifying compatibility between licenses; helping developers to identify RAILs in 3rd party repositories in order to facilitate RAIL compliance; and even software tools devoted to automate certain aspects of the choices open to and/or made by licensors.

Possible Projects: 

  1. RAIL identification in AI repos & license clause comparator

  2. Compatibility rules - Detecting clauses conflicts in pull requests

  3. License Generators/Recommendation of RAIL clauses 

  4. Developing processes for decentralized IPR management and community norms for shared collaboration

Licensing & Legal Working Group

Aim: The Licensing & Legal WG aims to improve the legal understanding and interpretation of RAILs in order to facilitate their adoption by any individual or institution. Therefore, the WG is meant to foster discussion and develop solutions to address existing challenges related to use-restriction interpretation, identifying compatibility between RAILs, and the development of new RAIL licensing models.

Projects:

  1. Open Library of Use Restrictions: 

  • Open and collaborative public repository where existing and new use-based restrictions included on RAILs are interpreted, clarified and drafted for the public to include them into their legal frameworks acknowledging their rationale. Restrictions may be organized by domain (e.g., social media; medical; governmental; military; biometric; etc)

2. License Interpretation, Enforcement, and Compatibility

  • The enforcement of RAILs is a topic of great relevance for the community, volunteers joining the project will take charge of exploring  RAILs enforcement (e.g. new FAQs; guidelines; case studies).

  • The study of compatibility norms among different RAILs.

  • Preparing a Best Practices Guidelines for drafting RAIL licenses

3. License Development

  • Data licensing & OpenRAIL-D: Investigate the potential for practical use-restriction licenses for the datasets underlying AI systems

  • ML Libraries license - MLibrary OpenRAIL-S

4. Catalogue of existing RAILs and their interpretation

Advocacy & Public Policy Working Group

Aim: In order to promote the understanding and use of RAILs, coordinated efforts towards their advocacy among different communities, stakeholders and institutions is key. Thus, the Advocacy & Public Policy WG aims at gaining widespread support for the responsible use and sharing of AI, and related educational content, potentially leading to institutional partnerships with other organizations in the development and/or promotion of RAILs.

Projects:

  1. Community Outreach

  2. Institutional Partnerships

  • Universities’ Legal Hackathons

  • RAIL frameworks for public research institutions & governmental bodies

  • Collaboration with other Licensing Communities

3. Content generation & Public Advocacy

  • Blog posts

  • Workshops

  • Papers

4. Design public space for RAIL misuse signaling

How to join?

If you are interested in joining any of the WGs, please fill out this form in order to get access to the Slack Space and start collaborating. We will be hosting pages for each WG on the RAIL website to help disseminate progress. 

 
 
Team - Responsible AI Licenses Initiativeparticapation, community