An AI Ethics Case Study

Open Source AI: To Release or Not To Release the GPT-2 Synthetic Text Generator

In February 2019, the San Francisco-based Open AI group made a decision that sent reverberations through the AI and open source communities worldwide.First, it announced "GPT-2," a major improvement in language models which, according to its creators, generates "coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarizationall without task-specific training." Open AI then added this:

Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing amuch smaller version of GPT-2 along with samplingcode. We are not releasing the dataset, training code, or GPT-2 model weights.

Open-AI also released atechnical paper.GPT-2 is trained as a large-scale unsupervised language model on 40 GBs of content scraped from the Internet with a Reddit karma score of over 3. Given the "fake news" era, much discussion in the community followed on the potential harms to society vs. the benefits to researchers. Open AI then did a staged release. In May 2019, it released an expanded dataset with a more detailed model. Finally, in November, it released the full GPT-2, arguing this:

We've seenno strong evidenceof misuse so far.While we've seen some discussion around GPT-2's potential to augment high-volume/low-yield operations like spam and phishing, we haven't seen evidence of writing code, documentation, or instances of misuse. We think synthetic text generators have a higher chance of being misused if their outputs become more reliable and coherent. We acknowledge that we cannot be aware of all threats, and that motivated actors can replicate language models without model release.

Discussion questions:

1.For the full release of GPT-2, who are the stakeholders involved? Who are the people and/or organizations directly or indirectly impacted by GPT-2's release? Who are benefited? What types of harms might arise?

2.What issues and concerns come into focus in this case from applying each of the five ethical lenses?

• Rights
• Fairness/Justice
• Utilitarianism
• Common good
• Virtues

3.Given the discussion, how would assess the ethics of Open AI's decision in November to release GPT-2 in full?