Moderating Model Marketplaces: Platform Governance Puzzles for AI Intermediaries (RSM Speaker Series)

RSM welcomes Robert Gorwa and Michael Veale for a discussion of their research into the governance questions raised by the moderation of model marketplaces.

The AI development community is increasingly making use of hosting intermediaries intended to provide easy public access to a wide range of ‘open’ models and training data. These model marketplaces lower technical deployment barriers for hundreds of thousands of lay users, allowing them, for instance, to easily interact with and customize image-generation models, and to share and socially interact with the images created in the process. In this talk, we will explore the growing ecosystem of these various AI hosting intermediaries from HuggingFace to Civitai, discussing the political economic context, their social and technical affordances, and underlying business models. We will then turn to a discussion of the emerging governance issues that these platforms are currently grappling with, with a focus on the slow development of community guidelines and moderation practices in the image-generation model platform space. In the face of increasing public and private scrutiny, how are these new companies responding? And how might these platforms better mobilize resources to act as a careful, fair, and proportionate regulatory access point?