Cited by 94Ethics and Social Impacts of AIArtificial Intelligence ApplicationsLaw, AI, and Intellectual Property

The Gradient of Generative AI Release: Methods and Considerations

Open access
Solaiman, Irene·2023·2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

Abstract

As increasingly powerful generative AI systems are developed, the release method greatly varies. We propose a framework to assess six levels of access to generative AI systems: fully closed; gradual or staged access; hosted access; cloud-based or API access; downloadable access; and fully open. Each level, from fully closed to fully open, can be viewed as an option along a gradient. We outline key considerations across this gradient: release methods come with tradeoffs, especially around the tension between concentrating power and mitigating risks. Diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives are needed to examine and mitigate risk in generative AI systems from conception to deployment. We show trends in generative system release over time, noting closedness among large companies for powerful systems and openness among organizations founded on principles of openness. We also enumerate safety controls and guardrails for generative systems and necessary investments to improve future releases.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3593013.3593981

Cites

67 of 67 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The sheer amount of training data, the architectural complexity, and the many moving parts make full openness a tall order for generative AI.

    “The sheer amount of training data, the architectural complexity, and the many moving parts make full openness a tall order for generative AI [53].”

    From Rethinking open source generative AI: open washing and the EU AI Act (2024) · cites this paper as [53]

    Section 5.4 (page unavailable) defines full openness as access to all system components, and §5.3.3 says model size can create an infrastructure barrier to access. Section 4.4 also says large training datasets are difficult to analyze at scale. The paper does not identify architectural complexity or the sheer amount of training data as reasons that fully opening a system is difficult. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • We are already seeing a strong trend towards selective and self-serving forms of openness, both in release strategies and in empirical surveys of model openness.

    “For one, we are already seeing a strong trend towards selective and self-serving forms of openness, both in release strategies and in empirical surveys of model openness ([32, 53, 60], and see below).”

    From Rethinking open source generative AI: open washing and the EU AI Act (2024) · cites this paper as [53]

    Section 6.2 reports a trend toward closed or partly closed releases among large companies, and Section 5.1 notes that public-facing releases can be cherry-picked. These passages support selective release strategies, but they do not establish a trend toward self-serving forms of openness in empirical surveys of model openness. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The necessarily gradient nature of openness is seen in release methods, where prior work has pointed out tradeoffs between full openness and risk mitigation.

    “The necessarily gradient nature of openness is seen in release methods, where prior work has pointed out tradeoffs between full openness and risk mitigation [16, 53].”
  • For present-day generative AI systems, openness is not an all-or-nothing feature; rather, it is best conceived as a composite and gradient notion.

    “For present-day generative AI systems, it is not an all-or-nothing feature; rather, it is best conceived as a composite and gradient notion [53].”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Part of this paper’s reference list could not be split into single entries.

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 17

  1. Yochai Benkler. 2019. Don't let industry write the rules for AI. Nature News (May 2019). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01413-1
  2. A. Stevie Bergman, Gavin Abercrombie, Shannon Spruit, Dirk Hovy, Emily Dinan, Y-Lan Boureau, and Verena Rieser. 2022. Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI through Value Sensitive Design. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. Association for Computational Linguistics, Edinburgh, UK, 39-52. https:// aclanthology.org/2022.sigdial-1.4
  3. Li Cai and Yangyong Zhu. 2015. The Challenges of Data Quality and Data Quality Assessment in the Big Data Era. Data Sci. J. 14 (2015), 2.
  4. Abhishek Chakraborty, Ankit Mondal, and Ankur Srivastava. 2020. Hardware- Assisted Intellectual Property Protection of Deep Learning Models. In Proceed- ings of the 57th ACM/EDAC/IEEE Design Automation Conference (Virtual Event, USA) (DAC '20). IEEE Press, Article 172, 6 pages.
  5. Danish Contractor, Daniel McDuff, Julia Katherine Haines, Jenny Lee, Christo- pher Hines, and Brent J. Hecht. 2020. Behavioral Use Licensing for Responsible AI. CoRR abs/2011.03116 (2020). arXiv:2011.03116 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011. 03116 · arXiv
  6. Yao Dou, Maxwell Forbes, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Noah A. Smith, and Yejin Choi. 2021. Scarecrow: A Framework for Scrutinizing Machine Text. CoRR abs/2107.01294 (2021). arXiv:2107.01294 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.01294 · arXiv
  7. Angela Fan, Suzana Ilic, Thomas Wolf, and Matthias Gallé (Eds.). 2022. Pro- ceedings of BigScience Episode #5 -Workshop on Challenges & Perspectives in Creating Large Language Models. Association for Computational Linguistics, virtual+Dublin. https://aclanthology.org/2022.bigscience-1.0
  8. Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna M. Wallach, Hal Daumé III, and Kate Crawford. 2018. Datasheets for Datasets. CoRR abs/1803.09010 (2018). arXiv:1803.09010 http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09010 · arXiv
  9. Ganesh Jawahar, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, and Laks V. S. Lakshmanan. 2020. Automatic Detection of Machine Generated Text: A Critical Survey. CoRR abs/2011.01314 (2020). arXiv:2011.01314 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.01314 · arXiv
  10. Pratyusha Kalluri. 2020. Don't ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power. Nature News (July 2020). https://www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-020-02003-2
  11. Margaret Mitchell, Simone Wu, Andrew Zaldivar, Parker Barnes, Lucy Vasser- man, Ben Hutchinson, Elena Spitzer, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, and Timnit Ge- bru. 2018. Model Cards for Model Reporting. CoRR abs/1810.03993 (2018). arXiv:1810.03993 http://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03993 · arXiv
  12. Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, and William Isaac. 2020. Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence. CoRR abs/2007.04068 (2020). arXiv:2007.04068 https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04068 · arXiv
  13. Nikita Nangia, Clara Vania, Rasika Bhalerao, and Samuel R. Bowman. 2020. CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models. CoRR abs/2010.00133 (2020). arXiv:2010.00133 https: //arxiv.org/abs/2010.00133 · arXiv
  14. Thanh Thi Nguyen, Cuong M. Nguyen, Dung Tien Nguyen, Duc Thanh Nguyen, and Saeid Nahavandi. 2019. Deep Learning for Deepfakes Creation and Detec- tion. CoRR abs/1909.11573 (2019). arXiv:1909.11573 http://arxiv.org/abs/1909. 11573 · arXiv
  15. Lav R. Varshney, Nitish Shirish Keskar, and Richard Socher. 2020. Limits of De- tecting Text Generated by Large-Scale Language Models. CoRR abs/2002.03438 (2020). arXiv:2002.03438 https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.03438 · arXiv
  16. Annette Vee. 2022. Automated Trolling: The Case of GPT-4Chan When Artificial Intelligence is as Easy as Writing. Interfaces: Essays and Reviews in Computing and Culture Vol. 3, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota (2022), 102-111.
  17. Mingfu Xue, Can He, Jian Wang, and Weiqiang Liu. 2020. DNN Intellectual Property Protection: Taxonomy, Methods, Attack Resistance, and Evaluations. CoRR abs/2011.13564 (2020). arXiv:2011.13564 https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13564 · arXiv

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Solaiman, I.
Affiliations
Hugging Face (US)
Corresponding author
Solaiman, Irene
Venue
2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
Publisher
ACM
Published
2023-06-12
Pages
111-122
OpenAlex
W4380360954
Cited by
90
References
47
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 24 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 19
FWCI
22.53
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Artificial Intelligence Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Law, AI, and Intellectual Property
Keywords
access levels, open-source AI, API access, concentration of power, AI risk mitigation, safety control, guardrails, large corporations

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review