Last week I participated on a panel about the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), a proposed computing and data resource for academic AI researchers. The NAIRR’s goal is to subsidize the spiraling costs of many types of AI research that have put them out of reach of most academic groups.
My comments on the panel were based on a recent study by researchers Kenny Peng, Arunesh Mathur, and me (NeurIPS ‘21) on the potential harms of AI. We looked at almost 1,000 research papers to analyze how they used datasets, which are the engine of AI.
Let me briefly mention just two of the many things we found, and then I’ll present some ideas for NAIRR based on our findings. First, we found that “derived datasets” are extremely common. For example, there’s a popular facial recognition dataset called Labeled Faces in the Wild, and there are at least 20 new datasets that incorporate the original data and extend it in some way. One of them adds race and gender annotations. This means that a dataset may enable new harms over time. For example, once you have race annotations, you can use it to build a model that tracks the movement of ethnic minorities through surveillance cameras, which some governments seem to be doing.
We also found that dataset creators are aware of their potential for misuse, so they often have licenses restricting their use for research and not for commercial purposes. Unfortunately, we found evidence that many companies simply get around this by downloading a model pre-trained on that dataset (in a research context) and using that model in commercial products.
Stepping back, the main takeaway from our paper is that dataset creators can sometimes — but not always — anticipate the ways in which a dataset might be used or misused in harmful ways. So we advocate for what we call dataset stewarding, which is a governance process that lasts throughout the lifecycle of a dataset. Note that some prominent datasets see active use for decades.
I think NAIRR is ideally positioned to be the steward of the datasets that it hosts, and perform a vital governance role over datasets and, in turn, over AI research. Here are a few specific things NAIRR could do, starting with the most lightweight ones.
1. NAIRR should support a communication channel between a dataset creator and the researchers who use that dataset. For example, if ethical problems — or even scientific problems — are uncovered in a dataset, it should be possible to notify users about it. As trivial as this sounds, it is not always the case today. Prominent datasets have been retracted over ethical concerns without a way to notify the people who had downloaded it.
2. NAIRR should standardize dataset citation practices, for example, by providing Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for datasets. We found that citation practices are chaotic, and there is currently no good way to find all the papers that use a dataset to check for misuse.
3. NAIRR could publish standardized dataset licenses. Dataset creators aren’t legal experts, and most of the licenses don’t accomplish what dataset creators want them to accomplish, enabling misuse.
4. NAIRR could require some analog of broader impact statements as part of an application for data or compute resources. Writing a broader impact statement could encourage ethical reflection by the authors. (A recent study found evidence that the NeurIPS broader impact requirement did result in authors reflecting on the societal consequences of their technical work.) Such reflection is valuable even if the statements are not actually used for decision making about who is approved.
5. NAIRR could require some sort of ethical review of proposals. This goes beyond broader impact statements by making successful review a condition of acceptance. One promising model is the Ethics and Society Review instituted at Stanford. Most ethical issues that arise in AI research fall outside the scope of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), so even a lightweight ethical review process could help prevent obvious-in-hindsight ethical lapses.
6. If researchers want to use a dataset to build and release a derivative dataset or pretrained model, then there should be an additional layer of scrutiny, because these involve essentially republishing the dataset. In our research, we found that this is the start of an ethical slippery slope, because data and models can be recombined in various ways and the intent of the original dataset can be lost.
7. There should be a way for people to report to NAIRR that some ethics violation is going on. The current model, for lack of anything better, is vigilante justice: journalists, advocates, or researchers sometimes identify ethical issues in datasets, and if the resulting outcry is loud enough, dataset creators feel compelled to retract or modify them.
8. NAIRR could effectively partner with other entities that have emerged as ethical regulators. For example, conference program committees have started to incorporate ethics review. If NAIRR made it easy for peer reviewers to check the policies for any given data or compute resource, that would let them verify that a submitted paper is compliant with those policies.
There is no single predominant model for ethical review of AI research analogous to the IRB model for biomedical research. It is unlikely that one will emerge in the foreseeable future. Instead, a patchwork is taking shape. The NAIRR is set up to be a central player in AI research in the United States and, as such, bears responsibility for ensuring that the research that it supports is aligned with societal values.
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I’m grateful to the NAIRR task force for inviting me and to my fellow panelists and moderators for a stimulating discussion. I’m also grateful to Sayash Kapoor and Mihir Kshirsagar, with whom I previously submitted a comment on this topic to the relevant federal agencies, and to Solon Barocas for helpful discussions.
A final note: the aims of the NAIRR have themselves been contested and are not self-evidently good. However, my comments (and the panel overall) assumed that the NAIRR will be implemented largely as currently conceived, and focused on harm mitigation.
