Posts
Undermining the foundation of open source AI?
Today, the European Parliament's IMCO and LIBE committees adopted their joint report on the proposed AI Act. The text includes additional safeguards for fundamental rights and an overall more cautious approach to AI. In this post, we provide an in-depth analysis of the implications of the text for open source AI development.
Friction and AI Governance: through the Scale of the City
AI governance captures a wide range of processes and conversations, from internal governance policies for companies to public, national, and transnational regulatory bodies. For this blog series, I intend to map places where friction in this seemingly effortless and inevitable flow of technology occurs.
Concerns Over the Impact of the AI Act on Open-Source R&D: LAION’s open letter
Establishing a regulatory framework that achieves the dual objectives of protecting open-source AI systems and mitigating risks of potential harm is a critical imperative for the European Union. Especially since open-source, publicly supported AI systems are crucial digital public infrastructures that would ensure Europe’s sovereignty.
LAION petitions for a European public AI mission
The LAION proposal calls for a public research facility capable of building large-scale artificial intelligence models. It offers an alternative to corporate development of AI, in which responsible use is ensured in open source environments through the involvement of democratically elected institutions.
AI is already out there. We need commons-based governance, not a moratorium
The Future of Life Institute published an open letter asking for a moratorium on generative AI development. Yet social harms caused by AI will not be addressed in this way. Instead, commons-based governance of existing AI systems is needed.
Protecting Creatives or Impeding Progress?
As generative machine learning (ML) becomes more widespread, the issue of copyright and ML input is back in focus. This post explores the Eu legal framework governing the use of copyrighted works for training ML systems and the potential for collective action by artists and creators.
Paradox of Open Redux
After many conversations on the Paradox of Open, and the series of responses to their essay, Alek Tarkowski and Paul Keller share their reflections on the issue of addressing the power imbalances in the open ecosystems.
Straw Men and Weak Reeds: Persistent Myths About The Open Movement
James Boyle reacts to Jan J. Zygmuntowski's opinion on Paradox of Open: Responses.
Gatekeepers of open
As a contribution to his fellowship, Jan J. Zygmuntowski wrote an opinion on the Paradox of Open, which builds – and responds to – the series of responses to the Paradox of Open.
How will the AI Act deal with open source AI systems?
None of the approaches dealing with open source AI systems in the AI Act address the concerns related to chilling effects on open source AI development so far. The Parliament still has the opportunity to address these concerns without jeopardizing the AI Act’s overall regulatory objective by leveraging on the inherent transparency of open source, writes Paul Keller.
Open Future Fellowship 2023
We are looking for two Fellows to contribute to our work on advancing digital public space and designing the future of open. The application submission deadline is 31 December 2022.
Publications
Shifting tides
Our research aims to understand the current state of the open movement, as seen through the eyes of people actively involved in its endeavors and leading organizations within the movement.
Exploring the Intersection of Openness and AI
The rapid advancements in AI challenge the concept of openness on the internet, as companies use publicly available data to their advantage, frequently disregarding the concerns and welfare of other parties, such as artists and content creators, and the impacts of the tools they make available for use. There is a growing realization that the […]
The Growth of responsible AI licensing
The RAIL licenses are gaining ground, but permissive sharing is still the prominent norm governing the sharing of ML models on huggingface.co. This analysis aims at understanding how licenses are used by developers making ML model-related code and or data publicly available.
AI_Commons
The AI_Commons Final Report summarizes our findings and offers recommendations for commons-based governance of AI datasets.
Paradox of Open: Responses
We asked leaders and experts from the broad open movement to respond to the Paradox of Open, and published their responses in an online anthology.
AI_Commons white paper
This white paper presents the case of using openly licensed photographs for AI facial recognition training datasets. The analysis is part of our exploration of how AI training datasets, and works included in those datasets, can be better governed and shared as a commons.
Proposal to leverage Article 17 to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works.
White-paper on how to to leverage Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works.
The Paradox of Open
The Paradox of Open is the essay that we published in March 2021 to mark the launch of Open Future. In this essay we reflect on almost 20 years of our involvement in the open movement.
Events
April 13, 2023
Critical Infrastructure Lab launch: What should the next European Commission do?
Yesterday, at the Critical Infrastructure Lab launch event in Amsterdam, we hosted a workshop on “Imagining the future: what should the next European Comission do”. Our session focused on brainstorming ideas that could be brought up to the attention of the next Commission, whose term is about to start in the fall in 2024. We […]
March 23, 2023
Mozfest 2023: AI systems as a challenge to concentrations of power
On 23 March, we organised a roundtable titled “Open AI systems: will they challenge the concentrations of power?”, during the Mozilla Festival 2023.
November 30, 2022
Open Future Salon #2. Launch of Paradox of Open: Responses
On 30 November at 17:00 CET (16:00 UTC), online, we hosted an Open Future Salon to launch "Paradox of Open: Responses."
September 15, 2021
Open Future Sessions Season 2: Conversation of the openness of today and tomorrow
A collection of the summaries of the conversations we had with thought leaders from the Open Movement during Season 2 of the Open Future Sessions (September 2021-June 2022), to address the key challenges that Open faces today.
September 21, 2021
Protecting Open Licenses in the EU Copyright Reform at CC Global Summit 2021
Presentation of the White Paper: "Proposal to Leverage Art.17 of CDSM Directive to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works"
September 20, 2021
Future of Open Sessions at CC Global Summit 2021
The CC Global Summit is among the events that create the beat of the Open Movement. In this 2021 Summit edition we teamed up with Library Futures, Wikimedia and Invest in Open for a series of interrelated conversations about the Future of Open.
October 29, 2021
Global Congress on Intellectual Property & the Public Interest
Workshop on Copyright and the Digital Economy
September 20, 2021
Rethink Design
DCODE Summer School 2021: Introducing DCODE challenges, outlining new design ideals for our digital future, and setting the ground for a shared vocabulary.
