Documenting Ethical Considerations in Open Source AI Models

TL;DR

This study investigates how open source AI models are documented with ethical considerations, revealing common themes and providing recommendations to improve ethical documentation practices for developers.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes ethics-related documentation in open source AI models, identifying key themes and offering practical suggestions for enhancing ethical transparency.

Findings

Six ethical themes identified, including risks and mitigation strategies.

Documentation mainly focuses on ethical problem statements and use case restrictions.

Provides recommendations for stakeholders to improve ethical documentation practices.

Abstract

Background: The development of AI-enabled software heavily depends on AI model documentation, such as model cards, due to different domain expertise between software engineers and model developers. From an ethical standpoint, AI model documentation conveys critical information on ethical considerations along with mitigation strategies for downstream developers to ensure the delivery of ethically compliant software. However, knowledge on such documentation practice remains scarce. Aims: The objective of our study is to investigate how developers document ethical aspects of open source AI models in practice, aiming at providing recommendations for future documentation endeavours. Method: We selected three sources of documentation on GitHub and Hugging Face, and developed a keyword set to identify ethics-related documents systematically. After filtering an initial set of 2,347 documents, we identified 265 relevant ones and performed thematic analysis to derive the themes of ethical considerations. Results: Six themes emerge, with the three largest ones being model behavioural risks, model use cases, and model risk mitigation. Conclusions: Our findings reveal that open source AI model documentation focuses on articulating ethical problem statements and use case restrictions. We further provide suggestions to various stakeholders for improving documentation practice regarding ethical considerations.