Timeline
There is an urgent need to address the issue and set a clear standard for transparency with regard to AI training and access to training datasets. The European policymakers avoided answering the questions that could help ensure openness in the context of AI development.
In this article, Nadia takes a closer look at and debunks a few popular participation practices.
At our first 2024 AI and the Commons Community Call, we were joined by Eryk Salvaggio, an interdisciplinary researcher, lecturer, and artist who works with digital media and AI.
Open Future is hosting an asynchronous, virtual alignment assembly for the open movement to explore principles and considerations for regulating generative AI. We hope to reach 500 participants, spread across different fields of open and coming from different regions of the world.
To discuss the work presented in “Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI," we have invited its authors to join our monthly community calls, which explore the intersection of AI and the Commons.
As a part of exploring the relationship between generative AI systems and the commons, we have been looking closely at the approach taken on Wikipedia.
Late last week, the European Commission, the Member States, and the European Parliament reached a deal on the AI Act. The current compromise is a combination of tiered obligations and a limited open source exemption which creates a situation where open source AI models can get away with being less transparent and less well-documented than proprietary GPAI models.
Representatives of the European Parliament, EU member states, and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement on the proposed AI Act. The copyright provisions in the AI Act are a step in the right direction. They further consolidate the existing balanced legislative approach adopted by the EU in the 2019 CDSM Directive.
Open Future partnered with the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, which organized the event.
The blog post argues that with increasing convergence on creator/rightholder opt-outs as an essential mechanism in the governance of generative AI models, there is an urgent need for standardization of machine readable opt outs.
As the debate over how the AI Act should deal with foundation models reaches a climax, we argue that it would be a mistake to leave this crucial aspect of AI regulation to the AI companies themselves, and that there is indeed a need for mandatory transparency and documentation requirements.
This opinion takes a closer look at how the Falcon 180B model is licensed and is a part of our exploration of the emergent standards for the sharing of AI models.
Some experts believe that open-sourcing AI increases the risk of malicious use. In this opinion, we argue that calls for regulators to intervene and limit the possibility of open-sourcing AI models must consider the impact on freedom of expression.
The Creative Commons Global Summit in Mexico City is taking place this week between 3 and 6 of October. The event, whose theme is AI & the Commons, is attended by both Alek and Paul.
This Open Future policy brief examines the technical implementation of the EU law provision allowing authors and other rightholders to opt out of having their works used as training data for (generative) machine learning (ML) systems.
We agree with Widder, West, and Whittaker that openness alone will not democratize AI. However, it is clear to us that any alternative to current Big Tech-driven AI must be, among other things, open.
There is a growing need for a new set of community-based principles and governance framework for the digital commons, which combines the achievements of free culture with care for other rights and balances sharing with consent.
In this article, Open Future fellow Nadia Nadesan shares learnings from facilitating a citizen assembly with Algorights to investigate local participation concerning the AI Act.
In this analysis, I review the Llama 2 release strategy and show its non-compliance with the open-source standard. Furthermore, I explain how this case demonstrates the need for more robust governance that mandates training data transparency.
Today — together with Hugging Face, Eleuther.ai, LAION, GitHub, and Creative Commons, we publish a statement on Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act. We strongly believe that open source and open science are the building blocks of trustworthy AI and should be promoted in the EU.
We need a more holistic approach that considers how machine learning technologies impact Wikimedia — changes to editing, disintermediation of users, and governance of free knowledge as a resource used in AI training. These changes call for an overall strategy that balances the need to protect the organization from negative impact and harms with the need to deploy new technologies in productive ways to help build the digital commons.
Fields of open is a report which consists of findings from an exploratory mapping of the movement using network analysis methods and data collected from Twitter. The first part consists of a definition of the open movement, followed by a conceptualization of the movement as consisting of distinct but connected fields of open. The second part comprises methodological information about social network analysis and data visualization. The third part includes a presentation of the network visualizations and their analysis.
This article examines an example from the global women's rights movement of how organizations and institutions support local actors to participate in transnational AI governance and challenge top-down structures and mechanisms.
There has been a lot of attention on copyright and generative AI/ML over the last few months. In this essay, I propose a two-fold strategy to tackle this situation. First, it is essential to guarantee that individual creators can opt out of having their works used in AI training. Second, we should implement a levy that redirects a portion of the surplus from training AI on humanity's collective creativity back to the commons.
Together with the critical infrastructure lab, we brought together 25 European experts working on interoperability, standards governance and identity protocols.
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.
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.
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.
We hosted a workshop with a small group of the movement’s leaders. It was co-organized by our partners at the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia Europe. Participants represented a broad range of views that allowed us to identify the strategic tensions within the movement relating to, a.o., its politics, socio-economic constraints, digital rights, and equity.
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.
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.
At the Critical Infrastructure Lab launch event in Amsterdam, we hosted a workshop on “Imagining the future: what should the next European Commission do”.
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 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.
On 23 March, we organised a roundtable titled “Open AI systems: will they challenge the concentrations of power?”, during the Mozilla Festival 2023.
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.
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.
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.
James Boyle reacts to Jan J. Zygmuntowski's opinion on Paradox of Open: Responses.
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.
The AI_Commons Final Report summarizes our findings and offers recommendations for commons-based governance of AI datasets.
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.
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.
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.
On 30 November at 17:00 CET (16:00 UTC), online, we hosted an Open Future Salon to launch "Paradox of Open: Responses."
In the 2023 budget, the EP allocated funding for a pilot project to explore the feasibility of a Public EU directory of works in the public domain and under free licenses, something that Paul Keller and Felix Reda suggested in a white paper in 2021.
Thirty-two civil society organizations worldwide launch the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Coalition to improve access to knowledge around the globe.
We are publishing today, as a request for comments, a white paper on understanding the implications of face recognition training with CC-licensed photographs.
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.
Instead of focusing only on fixing the platforms, the EU must introduce measures that would allow the emergence of alternatives to the current fundamentally flawed system of “online malls.”
Instead of analyzing the functioning of image generators through the lens of copyright, we should ask ourselves a normative question: Why should we want that copyright applies to the visual output of these generators?
For our ninth Open Future Session, we invited Sébastien Shulz, co-founder of the Collectif pour une société des Communs and coordinator of the working group on politics of the digital commons at CNRS, to learn more about the role that public bodies can play in supporting the digital commons.
This new report "Towards a sovereign digital infrastructure of Commons" published by the French Council presidency makes a powerful argument for putting digital commons at the heart of efforts to build sovereign digital infrastructures.
For our eighth Open Future Session, we invited Julia Kloiber, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Superrr Lab, to learn more about how the feminist perspective can enrich thinking about openness.
Zuzanna Warso is the Director of Research at Open Future. In this role, she will manage all the research activities, including further developing our research agenda and our fellowship program.
For the 7th Open Future session, we invited the convenors of the Open Climate community to discuss how working on climate and sustainability issues is also a chance for the open movement to reimagine itself.
Last week the Court of Justice of the European Union finally decided to embrace the possibilities offered by the Internet and to start streaming hearings and judgements. Paul argues that this is an important step towards more openness and transparency of Europe's highest court.
For our sixth Open Future Session, we invited Anna Mazgal, Senior EU Policy Advisor at Wikimedia DE, and Alejandro Mayoral Baños, activist and Director of the Indigenous Friends Association (IFA), to talk about online "care protocols" and how the open movement addresses the harms perpetrated in the platform ecosystem.
The final DMA proposal mandates that messaging services meeting the definition of "large gatekeeper platforms" will need to become interoperable. As a result, these key types of services will shift from a collection of “walled gardens” controlled by their owners to a connected — more open — ecosystem.
For our fifth Open Future Session, we invited Olivier Schulbaum, co-founder, President and Head of R&D of Platoniq, to talk about political user experiences within of the digital platformization of the solidarity economy.
For our fourth Open Future Session, we invited Mike Linksvayer, Head Developer Policy at Github, to talk about open source and sovereignty.
For our third Open Future Session, we invited Andrés Arauz – the Minister of Knowledge of Ecuador in the years 2015-2017. Andrés told us how the Ministry established a policy to build a “social knowledge economy”, which translated into multiple actions supporting, in particular, a knowledge commons.
The financial valuations of major recording artists' catalogs are going through the roof, with Bruce Springsteen's right having recently been sold for more than half a billion dollars. One consequence of the ongoing financialization of the music copyright may very well be further pressure on the public domain.
As the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) enters into its next phase with the launch of national and European citizens’ panels, it's time to take stock of the initiative to see how it allows civic perspective to influence policy discussions.
Workshop on Copyright and the Digital Economy
In conversation with Lyam Wyatt and Lane Becker about Wikimedia Enterprise the paid service targeted at commercial users of Wikimedia that was launched on the 26th of October by the Wikimedia Foundation.
In conversation with Brewster Kahle, the Founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive on the value of openness, twenty years since key ways of doing things in the open were established.
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.
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"
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.
DCODE Summer School 2021: Introducing DCODE challenges, outlining new design ideals for our digital future, and setting the ground for a shared vocabulary.
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.
The Conference on the Future of Europe–CoFoE–represents an unprecedented democratic exercise bringing mass citizen participation through digital platforms. The Open Movement and other activist organizations should use this opportunity to shape future EU policies.
Openly licensed photographs of faces have been broadly used for the training of AI facial recognition systems. This is widely presented as an example of corporate extraction of value from the commons, yet no policy or governance solution has been provided to this challenge.
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.
Today the Open Future Foundation, a new think tank for the open movement, has launched. Open Future’s goal is to strengthen the European advocacy efforts conducted by organisations advocating for open access to knowledge and culture and to ensure that the principles of this open movement are reflected in the European Union’s digital policy framework.
