OpenRAIL: Towards open and responsible AI licensing frameworks

Open & Responsible AI licenses ("OpenRAIL") are AI-specific licenses enabling open access, use and distribution of AI artifacts while requiring a responsible use of the latter. OpenRAIL licenses could be for open and responsible ML what current open software licenses are to code and Creative Commons to general content: a widespread community licensing tool. Advances in machine learning and other AI-related areas have flourished these past years partly thanks to the ubiquity of the open source culture in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector, which has permeated into ML research and development dynamics. Notwithstanding the benefits of openness as a core value for innovation in the field, (not so already) recent events related to the ethical and socio-economic concerns of development and use of machine learning models have spread a clear message: Openness is not enough. Closed systems are not the answer though, as the problem persists under the opacity of firms' private AI development processes.