Moderating Model Marketplaces: Platform Governance Puzzles for AI Intermediaries

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, Robert Gorwa and Michael Veale 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.
MODERATOR
Nick Lindseth is a Program Manager for the Berkman Klein Center’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media. He supports the Institute’s slate of programming, works closely with its visiting scholars, and runs the RSM speaker series. He holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the Oxford Internet Institute, where his thesis focused on local subreddits and political participation, and graduated from Brown University with a degree in English and Political Science.
SPEAKERS
Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He conducts interdisciplinary empirical and conceptual research addressing the politics of technology policy with a special interest in government-industry relations and emerging socio-technical governance arrangements in the platform economy. Gorwa received his doctorate from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford and is currently a fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology and Centre for International Governance Innovation, as well as a co-founder of the Platform Governance Research Network (PlatGovNet). His first book, The Politics of Platform Regulation, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
Michael Veale is Associate Professor in digital rights and regulation, and Vice-Dean (Education Innovation) at University College London’s Faculty of Laws. His research focuses on how to understand and address challenges of power and justice that digital technologies and their users create and exacerbate, in areas such as privacy-enhancing technologies and machine learning. This work is regularly cited by legislators, regulators and governments, and Dr Veale has consulted for a range of policy organizations including the Royal Society and British Academy, the Law Society of England and Wales, the European Commission, the Commonwealth Secretariat. Dr Veale holds a PhD from UCL, a MSc from Maastricht University and a BSc from LSE. He tweets at @mikarv.
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The Institute for Rebooting Social Media (RSM) is a three-year, “pop-up” research initiative at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center to accelerate progress towards addressing social media’s most urgent problems, including misinformation, privacy breaches, harassment, and content governance. By convening participants across industry, government, civil society, and academia in focused, time-bound collaboration, the Institute has a portfolio of research, projects, programming, and educational opportunities aimed at improving the state of digital social spaces. Learn more about RSM here: rebootingsocialmedia.org/
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