Repository should have unambiguous document saying what "ethical or appropriate uses" are, and if usage for NSFW/mature content generation is permitted. about stablelm

[MarkSchmidty]

In clarification and, for the avoidance of any doubt

The license is the license. Apache 2.0 does not contain any ethical restrictions, and that is a good thing.

The base models are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 which unambiguously allows use "for any purpose" with "no additional restrictions" beyond requiring that changes to the model have the same license and give credit to StabilityAI:

"Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Ethical "clarifications" would be a step backwards for openness.

[MarkSchmidty]

Community Guideline and similar ethical concern documents are actively harmful in open source.

There is, thankfully, no authority to "deal with" ethical concerns and no guidance needed.

The license is the license.

[Aspie96]

@MarkSchmidty, I agree.

I think that, as in the free and open source software tradition, the only correct answer to "What ethical restrictions should there be?" is "None".

Everyone can make any ethical statement one wishes on one's own personal blog. The "LICENSE.txt" file is the wrong place to do so.

[MarkSchmidty]

Where is the phrase "ethical or appropriate uses" even used in this repository?

It isn't and it should remain that way.

Ethical requirements beyond "don't use it for evil"

Evil is highly ambiguous. I would go as far to say even that requirement is inherently problematic.

Anyway, the licenses clearly allow all uses and are irrevocable. So any kind of ethical statement would be unenforceable and meaningless at best, if not actively harmful.

[MarkSchmidty]

"Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Thanks for the details. I thought this model cannot be used commercially based on the license in the HF model hub. These models are intended to be used by the open-source community chat-like applications in adherence with the [CC BY-NC-SA-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) license.

That is the license for the "Tuned" models only, likely because they were trained on datasets of GPT-3/4 output and Stability doesn't want beef with OpenAI. The "Base" model license allows commercial use (with sharealike and attribution).

[afarlie]

Thank you. I've already closed this issue. I'm delighted that 'free' here means 'free' :) .

[MarkSchmidty]

You don't need my permission to repeat my words. But I appreciate the sentiment.

[ProGamerGov]

Ethical requirements beyond "don't use it for evil" can be very subjective and ambiguous, which then leads to a potential for actually causing harm. Like for example NSFW bans tend to disproportionately affect the LGBTQ community.

[Aspie96]

Where is the phrase "ethical or appropriate uses" even used in this repository?

I'm actually curious as to why Stability chose to use a unrestricted CC license for StableLM but chose to use a restricted CreativeML Open RAIL license for Stable Diffusion.

[Andrey36652]

@eiery Maybe they learned from Stable Diffusion release, that it's better to use an unrestricted license?

[afarlie]

Ethical "clarifications" would be a step backwards for openness.

I actually support that viewpoint, and I am encouraged by the strength of the responses here.!

However, I still feel that there should be some kind of guidance document addressing how certain ethical concerns could be dealt with, and how to handle them, even if it's one written with a very open minded and 'liberal' viewpoint, assuming that the overwhelming majority of potential re-users are going to be competent, responsible, and aware of both the potential and pitfalls of the technologies they are creating.

[afarlie]

Ethical requirements beyond "don't use it for evil" can be very subjective and ambiguous, which then leads to a potential for actually causing harm. Like for example NSFW bans tend to disproportionately affect the LGBTQ community.

You make an excellent point here. NSFW bans can disproportionately affect LGBTQ communities, which is why it is my view that tools/models which allow NSFW use, should be upfront about saying this, so that potential re-users can reject "non-free" (GNU sense) tools. Being transparent up front about what you allow is better than burying what you don't in Eula, Terms of Service, or a (Non)-"Sharing" policy, on a website that few people actually read.

[afarlie]

Thank you.. Closing this issue as the consensus here seems to be that such a document is un-necessary and actively harmful.

[Aspie96]

@afarlie

However, I still feel that there should be some kind of guidance document addressing how certain ethical concerns could be dealt with, and how to handle them,

What ought to be done is a matter of opinion anyone can discuss, regardless of whether they are publishing models or not.

There is really no reasons for statements like that to be part of this repo. Anyone, including of course anyone working at StabilityAI, can make them outside of technical places, such as on blogs and the like.

[amrrs]

"Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Thanks for the details. I thought this model cannot be used commercially based on the license in the HF model hub.
These models are intended to be used by the open-source community chat-like applications in adherence with the [CC BY-NC-SA-4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) license.

[Aspie96]

Models under the CC BY-NC-SA license cannot be used commercially. Models under CC BY-SA can, but of course there is a ShareAlike clause.

[afarlie]

Community Guideline and similar ethical concern documents are actively harmful in open source.

Do you mind if I use that quote elsewhere (do you have an appropriate attirbution I could use)?
Restrictions on use imposed by other AI models/datasets are EXACTLY why there need to be "Free" (GNU sense) models :)

[afarlie]

You don't need my permission to repeat my words. But I appreciate the sentiment.

Thanks, if you want to comment in the linked issues directly, feel free :) . Encouraging 'free' (Gnu sense) is a good thing.