upstream-opacity · bommasani-2023-fmti

Overall scores vary significantly given a range of 42 between the highest-scoring developer, Meta, at 54 and the lowest-scoring developer, Amazon, at 12. Relative to the mean overall score of 37, [...] Upstream resource transparency scores the worst (Figure 8). Breaking down the trends by domain, scores are consistently the worst for the upstream domain, particularly the Data, Data Labor, and Compute subdomains. [...] Within the upstream domain, no company scores points for indicators about data creators, the copyright and license status of data, and mitigations related to copyright. The industry-wide lack of transparency on these issues relates directly to pressing societal concerns related to copyright and intellectual property, which are the subject of ongoing litigation. [...] For data creators, in part we believe this reflects the nascent status of methods for providing web-scale understanding of who created the data (e.g. text, images) scraped from the Internet.