The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas. 

A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that caught the attention of Kim Van Deun, a fantasy illustrator who invited him to a Zoom call in November 2022 hosted by the Concept Art Association, an advocacy organization for artists working in commercial media. 

On the call, artists shared details of how they had been hurt by the generative AI boom, which was then brand new. At that moment, AI was suddenly everywhere. The tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical chairs made of avocados. 

But these artists saw this technological wonder as a new kind of theft. They felt the models were effectively stealing and replacing their work. Some had found that their art had been scraped off the internet and used to train the models, while others had discovered that their own names had become prompts, causing their work to be drowned out online by AI knockoffs.

Zhao remembers being shocked by what he heard. “People are literally telling you they’re losing their livelihoods,” he told me one afternoon this spring, sitting in his Chicago living room. “That’s something that you just can’t ignore.” 

So on the Zoom, he made a proposal: What if, hypothetically, it was possible to build a mechanism that would help mask their art to interfere with AI scraping?

“I would love a tool that if someone wrote my name and made a prompt, like, garbage came out,” responded Karla Ortiz, a prominent digital artist. “Just, like, bananas or some weird stuff.” 

That was all the convincing Zhao needed—the moment he joined the cause.

Fast-forward to today, and millions of artists have deployed two tools born from that Zoom: Glaze and Nightshade, which were developed by Zhao and the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab (an acronym for “security, algorithms, networking, and data”).

Arguably the most prominent weapons in an artist’s arsenal against nonconsensual AI scraping, Glaze and Nightshade work in similar ways: by adding what the researchers call “barely perceptible” perturbations to an image’s pixels so that machine-learning models cannot read them properly. Glaze, which has been downloaded more than 6 million times since it launched in March 2023, adds what’s effectively a secret cloak to images that prevents AI algorithms from picking up on and copying an artist’s style. Nightshade, which I wrote about when it was released almost exactly a year ago this fall, cranks up the offensive against AI companies by adding an invisible layer of poison to images, which can break AI models; it has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times. 

Thanks to the tools, “I’m able to post my work online,” Ortiz says, “and that’s pretty huge.” For artists like her, being seen online is crucial to getting more work. If they are uncomfortable about ending up in a massive for-profit AI model without compensation, the only option is to delete their work from the internet. That would mean career suicide. “It’s really dire for us,” adds Ortiz, who has become one of the most vocal advocates for fellow artists and is part of a class action lawsuit against AI companies, including Stability AI, over copyright infringement. 

But Zhao hopes that the tools will do more than empower individual artists. Glaze and Nightshade are part of what he sees as a battle to slowly tilt the balance of power from large corporations back to individual creators. 

“It is just incredibly frustrating to see human life be valued so little,” he says with a disdain that I’ve come to see as pretty typical for him, particularly when he’s talking about Big Tech. “And to see that repeated over and over, this prioritization of profit over humanity … it is just incredibly frustrating and maddening.” 

As the tools are adopted more widely, his lofty goal is being put to the test. Can Glaze and Nightshade make genuine security accessible for creators—or will they inadvertently lull artists into believing their work is safe, even as the tools themselves become targets for haters and hackers? While experts largely agree that the approach is effective and Nightshade could prove to be powerful poison, other researchers claim they’ve already poked holes in the protections offered by Glaze and that trusting these tools is risky. 

But Neil Turkewitz, a copyright lawyer who used to work at the Recording Industry Association of America, offers a more sweeping view of the fight the SAND Lab has joined. It’s not about a single AI company or a single individual, he says: “It’s about defining the rules of the world we want to inhabit.” 

Poking the bear

The SAND Lab is tight knit, encompassing a dozen or so researchers crammed into a corner of the University of Chicago’s computer science building. That space has accumulated somewhat typical workplace detritus—a Meta Quest headset here, silly photos of dress-up from Halloween parties there. But the walls are also covered in original art pieces, including a framed painting by Ortiz.  

Years before fighting alongside artists like Ortiz against “AI bros” (to use Zhao’s words), Zhao and the lab’s co-leader, Heather Zheng, who is also his wife, had built a record of combating harms posed by new tech. 

COURTESY OF SAND LAB

Though both earned spots on MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list for other work nearly two decades ago, when they were at the University of California, Santa Barbara (Zheng in 2005 for “cognitive radios” and Zhao a year later for peer-to-peer networks), their primary research focus has become security and privacy. 

The pair left Santa Barbara in 2017, after they were poached by the new co-director of the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute, Michael Franklin. All eight PhD students from their UC Santa Barbara lab decided to follow them to Chicago too. Since then, the group has developed a “bracelet of silence” that jams the microphones in AI voice assistants like the Amazon Echo. It has also created a tool called Fawkes—“privacy armor,” as Zhao put it in a 2020 interview with the New York Times—that people can apply to their photos to protect them from facial recognition software. They’ve also studied how hackers might steal sensitive information through stealth attacks on virtual-reality headsets, and how to distinguish human art from AI-generated images. 

“Ben and Heather and their group are kind of unique because they’re actually trying to build technology that hits right at some key questions about AI and how it is used,” Franklin tells me. “They’re doing it not just by asking those questions, but by actually building technology that forces those questions to the forefront.”

It was Fawkes that intrigued Van Deun, the fantasy illustrator, two years ago; she hoped something similar might work as protection against generative AI, which is why she extended that fateful invite to the Concept Art Association’s Zoom call. 

That call started something of a mad rush in the weeks that followed. Though Zhao and Zheng collaborate on all the lab’s projects, they each lead individual initiatives; Zhao took on what would become Glaze, with PhD student Shawn Shan (who was on this year’s Innovators Under 35 list) spearheading the development of the program’s algorithm. 

In parallel to Shan’s coding, PhD students Jenna Cryan and Emily Wenger sought to learn more about the views and needs of the artists themselves. They created a user survey that the team distributed to artists with the help of Ortiz. In replies from more than 1,200 artists—far more than the average number of responses to user studies in computer science—the team found that the vast majority of creators had read about art being used to train models, and 97% expected AI to decrease some artists’ job security. A quarter said AI art had already affected their jobs. 

Almost all artists also said they posted their work online, and more than half said they anticipated reducing or removing that online work, if they hadn’t already—no matter the professional and financial consequences.

The first scrappy version of Glaze was developed in just a month, at which point Ortiz gave the team her entire catalogue of work to test the model on. At the most basic level, Glaze acts as a defensive shield. Its algorithm identifies features from the image that make up an artist’s individual style and adds subtle changes to them. When an AI model is trained on images protected with Glaze, the model will not be able to reproduce styles similar to the original image. 

A painting from Ortiz later became the first image publicly released with Glaze on it: a young woman, surrounded by flying eagles, holding up a wreath. Its title is Musa Victoriosa, “victorious muse.” 

It’s the one currently hanging on the SAND Lab’s walls. 

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A post shared by Karla Ortiz (@kortizart)

Despite many artists’ initial enthusiasm, Zhao says, Glaze’s launch caused significant backlash. Some artists were skeptical because they were worried this was a scam or yet another data-harvesting campaign. 

The lab had to take several steps to build trust, such as offering the option to download the Glaze app so that it adds the protective layer offline, which meant no data was being transferred anywhere. (The images are then shielded when artists upload them.)  

Soon after Glaze’s launch, Shan also led the development of the second tool, Nightshade. Where Glaze is a defensive mechanism, Nightshade was designed to act as an offensive deterrent to nonconsensual training. It works by changing the pixels of images in ways that are not noticeable to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models so they interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. If poisoned samples are scraped into AI training sets, these samples trick the AI models: Dogs become cats, handbags become toasters. The researchers say only a relatively few examples are enough to permanently damage the way a generative AI model produces images.

Currently, both tools are available as free apps or can be applied through the project’s website. The lab has also recently expanded its reach by offering integration with the new artist-supported social network Cara, which was born out of a backlash to exploitative AI training and forbids AI-produced content.

In dozens of conversations with Zhao and the lab’s researchers, as well as a handful of their artist-collaborators, it’s become clear that both groups now feel they are aligned in one mission. “I never expected to become friends with scientists in Chicago,” says Eva Toorenent, a Dutch artist who worked closely with the team on Nightshade. “I’m just so happy to have met these people during this collective battle.” 

EVA TOORENENT

Her painting Belladonna, which is also another name for the nightshade plant, was the first image with Nightshade’s poison on it. 

“It’s so symbolic,” she says. “People taking our work without our consent, and then taking our work without consent can ruin their models. It’s just poetic justice.” 

No perfect solution

The reception of the SAND Lab’s work has been less harmonious across the AI community.

After Glaze was made available to the public, Zhao tells me, someone reported it to sites like VirusTotal, which tracks malware, so that it was flagged by antivirus programs. Several people also started claiming on social media that the tool had quickly been broken. Nightshade similarly got a fair share of criticism when it launched; as TechCrunch reported in January, some called it a “virus” and, as the story explains, “another Reddit user who inadvertently went viral on X questioned Nightshade’s legality, comparing it to ‘hacking a vulnerable computer system to disrupt its operation.’” 

“We had no idea what we were up against,” Zhao tells me. “Not knowing who or what the other side could be meant that every single new buzzing of the phone meant that maybe someone did break Glaze.” 

Both tools, though, have gone through rigorous academic peer review and have won recognition from the computer security community. Nightshade was accepted at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and Glaze received a distinguished paper award and the 2023 Internet Defense Prize at the Usenix Security Symposium, a top conference in the field. 

“In my experience working with poison, I think [Nightshade is] pretty effective,” says Nathalie Baracaldo, who leads the AI security and privacy solutions team at IBM and has studied data poisoning. “I have not seen anything yet—and the word yet is important here—that breaks that type of defense that Ben is proposing.” And the fact that the team has released the source code for Nightshade for others to probe, and it hasn’t been broken, also suggests it’s quite secure, she adds. 

At the same time, at least one team of researchers does claim to have penetrated the protections of Glaze, or at least an old version of it. 

As researchers from Google DeepMind and ETH Zurich detailed in a paper published in June, they found various ways Glaze (as well as similar but less popular protection tools, such as Mist and Anti-DreamBooth) could be circumvented using off-the-shelf techniques that anyone could access—such as image upscaling, meaning filling in pixels to increase the resolution of an image as it’s enlarged. The researchers write that their work shows the “brittleness of existing protections” and warn that “artists may believe they are effective. But our experiments show they are not.”

Florian Tramèr, an associate professor at ETH Zurich who was part of the study, acknowledges that it is “very hard to come up with a strong technical solution that ends up really making a difference here.” Rather than any individual tool, he ultimately advocates for an almost certainly unrealistic ideal: stronger policies and laws to help create an environment in which people commit to buying only human-created art. 

What happened here is common in security research, notes Baracaldo: A defense is proposed, an adversary breaks it, and—ideally—the defender learns from the adversary and makes the defense better. “It’s important to have both ethical attackers and defenders working together to make our AI systems safer,” she says, adding that “ideally, all defenses should be publicly available for scrutiny,” which would both “allow for transparency” and help avoid creating a false sense of security. (Zhao, though, tells me the researchers have no intention to release Glaze’s source code.)

Still, even as all these researchers claim to support artists and their art, such tests hit a nerve for Zhao. In Discord chats that were later leaked, he claimed that one of the researchers from the ETH Zurich–Google DeepMind team “doesn’t give a shit” about people. (That researcher did not respond to a request for comment, but in a blog post he said it was important to break defenses in order to know how to fix them. Zhao says his words were taken out of context.) 

Zhao also emphasizes to me that the paper’s authors mainly evaluated an earlier version of Glaze; he says its new update is more resistant to tampering. Messing with images that have current Glaze protections would harm the very style that is being copied, he says, making such an attack useless. 

This back-and-forth reflects a significant tension in the computer security community and, more broadly, the often adversarial relationship between different groups in AI. Is it wrong to give people the feeling of security when the protections you’ve offered might break? Or is it better to have some level of protection—one that raises the threshold for an attacker to inflict harm—than nothing at all? 

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an associate professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Imperial College London, says there are plenty of examples where similar technical protections have failed to be bulletproof. For example, in 2023, de Montjoye and his team probed a digital mask for facial recognition algorithms, which was meant to protect the privacy of medical patients’ facial images; they were able to break the protections by tweaking just one thing in the program’s algorithm (which was open source). 

Using such defenses is still sending a message, he says, and adding some friction to data profiling. “Tools such as TrackMeNot”—which protects users from data profiling—“have been presented as a way to protest; as a way to say I do not consent.”  

“But at the same time,” he argues, “we need to be very clear with artists that it is removable and might not protect against future algorithms.”

While Zhao will admit that the researchers pointed out some of Glaze’s weak spots, he unsurprisingly remains confident that Glaze and Nightshade are worth deploying, given that “security tools are never perfect.” Indeed, as Baracaldo points out, the Google DeepMind and ETH Zurich researchers showed how a highly motivated and sophisticated adversary will almost certainly always find a way in.

Yet it is “simplistic to think that if you have a real security problem in the wild and you’re trying to design a protection tool, the answer should be it either works perfectly or don’t deploy it,” Zhao says, citing spam filters and firewalls as examples. Defense is a constant cat-and-mouse game. And he believes most artists are savvy enough to understand the risk. 

Offering hope

The fight between creators and AI companies is fierce. The current paradigm in AI is to build bigger and bigger models, and there is, at least currently, no getting around the fact that they require vast data sets hoovered from the internet to train on. Tech companies argue that anything on the public internet is fair game, and that it is “impossible” to build advanced AI tools without copyrighted material; many artists argue that tech companies have stolen their intellectual property and violated copyright law, and that they need ways to keep their individual works out of the models—or at least receive proper credit and compensation for their use. 

So far, the creatives aren’t exactly winning. A number of companies have already replaced designers, copywriters, and illustrators with AI systems. In one high-profile case, Marvel Studios used AI-generated imagery instead of human-created art in the title sequence of its 2023 TV series Secret Invasion. In another, a radio station fired its human presenters and replaced them with AI. The technology has become a major bone of contention between unions and film, TV, and creative studios, most recently leading to a strike by video-game performers. There are numerous ongoing lawsuits by artists, writers, publishers, and record labels against AI companies. It will likely take years until there is a clear-cut legal resolution. But even a court ruling won’t necessarily untangle the difficult ethical questions created by generative AI. Any future government regulation is not likely to either, if it ever materializes. 

That’s why Zhao and Zheng see Glaze and Nightshade as necessary interventions—tools to defend original work, attack those who would help themselves to it, and, at the very least, buy artists some time. Having a perfect solution is not really the point. The researchers need to offer something now because the AI sector moves at breakneck speed, Zheng says, means that companies are ignoring very real harms to humans. “This is probably the first time in our entire technology careers that we actually see this much conflict,” she adds.

On a much grander scale, she and Zhao tell me they hope that Glaze and Nightshade will eventually have the power to overhaul how AI companies use art and how their products produce it. It is eye-wateringly expensive to train AI models, and it’s extremely laborious for engineers to find and purge poisoned samples in a data set of billions of images. Theoretically, if there are enough Nightshaded images on the internet and tech companies see their models breaking as a result, it could push developers to the negotiating table to bargain over licensing and fair compensation. 

That’s, of course, still a big “if.” MIT Technology Review reached out to several AI companies, such as Midjourney and Stability AI, which did not reply to requests for comment. A spokesperson for OpenAI, meanwhile, did not confirm any details about encountering data poison but said the company takes the safety of its products seriously and is continually improving its safety measures: “We are always working on how we can make our systems more robust against this type of abuse.”

In the meantime, the SAND Lab is moving ahead and looking into funding from foundations and nonprofits to keep the project going. They also say there has also been interest from major companies looking to protect their intellectual property (though they decline to say which), and Zhao and Zheng are exploring how the tools could be applied in other industries, such as gaming, videos, or music. In the meantime, they plan to keep updating Glaze and Nightshade to be as robust as possible, working closely with the students in the Chicago lab—where, on another wall, hangs Toorenent’s Belladonna. The painting has a heart-shaped note stuck to the bottom right corner: “Thank you! You have given hope to us artists.”

This story has been updated with the latest download figures for Glaze and Nightshade.

Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”

AI has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery and robotics and is in the process of entirely revolutionizing how we interact with machines and the web. The only problem is we don’t know exactly how it works, or why it works so well. We have a fair idea, but the details are too complex to unpick. That’s a problem: It could lead us to deploy an AI system in a highly sensitive field like medicine without understanding that it could have critical flaws embedded in its workings.

A team at Google DeepMind that studies something called mechanistic interpretability has been working on new ways to let us peer under the hood. At the end of July, it released Gemma Scope, a tool to help researchers understand what is happening when AI is generating an output. The hope is that if we have a better understanding of what is happening inside an AI model, we’ll be able to control its outputs more effectively, leading to better AI systems in the future.

“I want to be able to look inside a model and see if it’s being deceptive,” says Neel Nanda, who runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind. “It seems like being able to read a model’s mind should help.”

Mechanistic interpretability, also known as “mech interp,” is a new research field that aims to understand how neural networks actually work. At the moment, very basically, we put inputs into a model in the form of a lot of data, and then we get a bunch of model weights at the end of training. These are the parameters that determine how a model makes decisions. We have some idea of what’s happening between the inputs and the model weights: Essentially, the AI is finding patterns in the data and making conclusions from those patterns, but these patterns can be incredibly complex and often very hard for humans to interpret.

It’s like a teacher reviewing the answers to a complex math problem on a test. The student—the AI, in this case—wrote down the correct answer, but the work looks like a bunch of squiggly lines. This example assumes the AI is always getting the correct answer, but that’s not always true; the AI student may have found an irrelevant pattern that it’s assuming is valid. For example, some current AI systems will give you the result that 9.11 is bigger than 9.8. Different methods developed in the field of mechanistic interpretability are beginning to shed a little bit of light on what may be happening, essentially making sense of the squiggly lines.

“A key goal of mechanistic interpretability is trying to reverse-engineer the algorithms inside these systems,” says Nanda. “We give the model a prompt, like ‘Write a poem,’ and then it writes some rhyming lines. What is the algorithm by which it did this? We’d love to understand it.”

To find features—or categories of data that represent a larger concept—in its AI model, Gemma, DeepMind ran a tool known as a “sparse autoencoder” on each of its layers. You can think of a sparse autoencoder as a microscope that zooms in on those layers and lets you look at their details. For example, if you prompt Gemma about a chihuahua, it will trigger the “dogs” feature, lighting up what the model knows about “dogs.” The reason it is considered “sparse” is that it’s limiting the number of neurons used, basically pushing for a more efficient and generalized representation of the data.

The tricky part of sparse autoencoders is deciding how granular you want to get. Think again about the microscope. You can magnify something to an extreme degree, but it may make what you’re looking at impossible for a human to interpret. But if you zoom too far out, you may be limiting what interesting things you can see and discover. 

DeepMind’s solution was to run sparse autoencoders of different sizes, varying the number of features they want the autoencoder to find. The goal was not for DeepMind’s researchers to thoroughly analyze the results on their own. Gemma and the autoencoders are open-source, so this project was aimed more at spurring interested researchers to look at what the sparse autoencoders found and hopefully make new insights into the model’s internal logic. Since DeepMind ran autoencoders on each layer of their model, a researcher could map the progression from input to output to a degree we haven’t seen before.

“This is really exciting for interpretability researchers,” says Josh Batson, a researcher at Anthropic. “If you have this model that you’ve open-sourced for people to study, it means that a bunch of interpretability research can now be done on the back of those sparse autoencoders. It lowers the barrier to entry to people learning from these methods.”

Neuronpedia, a platform for mechanistic interpretability, partnered with DeepMind in July to build a demo of Gemma Scope that you can play around with right now. In the demo, you can test out different prompts and see how the model breaks up your prompt and what activations your prompt lights up. You can also mess around with the model. For example, if you turn the feature about dogs way up and then ask the model a question about US presidents, Gemma will find some way to weave in random babble about dogs, or the model may just start barking at you.

One interesting thing about sparse autoencoders is that they are unsupervised, meaning they find features on their own. That leads to surprising discoveries about how the models break down human concepts. “My personal favorite feature is the cringe feature,” says Joseph Bloom, science lead at Neuronpedia. “It seems to appear in negative criticism of text and movies. It’s just a great example of tracking things that are so human on some level.” 

You can search for concepts on Neuronpedia and it will highlight what features are being activated on specific tokens, or words, and how strongly each one is activated. “If you read the text and you see what’s highlighted in green, that’s when the model thinks the cringe concept is most relevant. The most active example for cringe is somebody preaching at someone else,” says Bloom.

Some features are proving easier to track than others. “One of the most important features that you would want to find for a model is deception,” says Johnny Lin, founder of Neuronpedia. “It’s not super easy to find: ‘Oh, there’s the feature that fires when it’s lying to us.’ From what I’ve seen, it hasn’t been the case that we can find deception and ban it.”

DeepMind’s research is similar to what another AI company, Anthropic, did back in May with Golden Gate Claude. It used sparse autoencoders to find the parts of Claude, their model, that lit up when discussing the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It then amplified the activations related to the bridge to the point where Claude literally identified not as Claude, an AI model, but as the physical Golden Gate Bridge and would respond to prompts as the bridge.

Although it may just seem quirky, mechanistic interpretability research may prove incredibly useful. “As a tool for understanding how the model generalizes and what level of abstraction it’s working at, these features are really helpful,” says Batson.

For example, a team lead by Samuel Marks, now at Anthropic, used sparse autoencoders to find features that showed a particular model was associating certain professions with a specific gender. They then turned off these gender features to reduce bias in the model. This experiment was done on a very small model, so it’s unclear if the work will apply to a much larger model.

Mechanistic interpretability research can also give us insights into why AI makes errors. In the case of the assertion that 9.11 is larger than 9.8, researchers from Transluce saw that the question was triggering the parts of an AI model related to Bible verses and September 11. The researchers concluded the AI could be interpreting the numbers as dates, asserting the later date, 9/11, as greater than 9/8. And in a lot of books like religious texts, section 9.11 comes after section 9.8, which may be why the AI thinks of it as greater. Once they knew why the AI made this error, the researchers tuned down the AI’s activations on Bible verses and September 11, which led to the model giving the correct answer when prompted again on whether 9.11 is larger than 9.8.

There are also other potential applications. Currently, a system-level prompt is built into LLMs to deal with situations like users who ask how to build a bomb. When you ask ChatGPT a question, the model is first secretly prompted by OpenAI to refrain from telling you how to make bombs or do other nefarious things. But it’s easy for users to jailbreak AI models with clever prompts, bypassing any restrictions. 

If the creators of the models are able to see where in an AI the bomb-building knowledge is, they can theoretically turn off those nodes permanently. Then even the most cleverly written prompt wouldn’t elicit an answer about how to build a bomb, because the AI would literally have no information about how to build a bomb in its system.

This type of granularity and precise control are easy to imagine but extremely hard to achieve with the current state of mechanistic interpretability. 

“A limitation is the steering [influencing a model by adjusting its parameters] is just not working that well, and so when you steer to reduce violence in a model, it ends up completely lobotomizing its knowledge in martial arts. There’s a lot of refinement to be done in steering,” says Lin. The knowledge of “bomb making,” for example, isn’t just a simple on-and-off switch in an AI model. It most likely is woven into multiple parts of the model, and turning it off would probably involve hampering the AI’s knowledge of chemistry. Any tinkering may have benefits but also significant trade-offs.

That said, if we are able to dig deeper and peer more clearly into the “mind” of AI, DeepMind and others are hopeful that mechanistic interpretability could represent a plausible path to alignment—the process of making sure AI is actually doing what we want it to do.

How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse

We are on the cusp of a voice AI boom, with tech companies such as Apple and OpenAI rolling out the next generation of artificial-intelligence-powered assistants. But the default voices for these assistants are often white American—British, if you’re lucky—and most definitely speak English. They represent only a tiny proportion of the many dialects and accents in the English language, which spans many regions and cultures. And if you’re one of the billions of people who don’t speak English, bad luck: These tools don’t sound nearly as good in other languages.

This is because the data that has gone into training these models is limited. In AI research, most data used to train models is extracted from the English-language internet, which reflects Anglo-American culture. But there is a massive grassroots effort underway to change this status quo and bring more transparency and diversity to what AI sounds like: Mozilla’s Common Voice initiative. 

The data set Common Voice has created over the past seven years is one of the most useful resources for people wanting to build voice AI. It has seen a massive spike in downloads, partly thanks to the current AI boom; it recently hit the 5 million mark, up from 38,500 in 2020. Creating this data set has not been easy, mainly because the data collection relies on an army of volunteers. Their numbers have also jumped, from just under 500,000 in 2020 to over 900,000 in 2024. But by giving its data away, some members of this community argue, Mozilla is encouraging volunteers to effectively do free labor for Big Tech. 

Since 2017, volunteers for the Common Voice project have collected a total of 31,000 hours of voice data in around 180 languages as diverse as Russian, Catalan, and Marathi. If you’ve used a service that uses audio AI, it’s likely been trained at least partly on Common Voice. 

Mozilla’s cause is a noble one. As AI is integrated increasingly into our lives and the ways we communicate, it becomes more important that the tools we interact with sound like us. The technology could break down communication barriers and help convey information in a compelling way to, for example, people who can’t read. But instead, an intense focus on English risks entrenching a new colonial world order and wiping out languages entirely.

“It would be such an own goal if, rather than finally creating truly multimodal, multilingual, high-performance translation models and making a more multilingual world, we actually ended up forcing everybody to operate in, like, English or French,” says EM Lewis-Jong, a director for Common Voice. 

Common Voice is open source, which means anyone can see what has gone into the data set, and users can do whatever they want with it for free. This kind of transparency is unusual in AI data governance. Most large audio data sets simply aren’t publicly available, and many consist of data that has been scraped from sites like YouTube, according to research conducted by a team from the University of Washington, and Carnegie Mellon andNorthwestern universities. 

The vast majority of language data is collected by volunteers such as Bülent Özden, a researcher from Turkey. Since 2020, he has been not only donating his voice but also raising awareness around the project to get more people to donate. He recently spent two full-time months correcting data and checking for typos in Turkish. For him, improving AI models is not the only motivation to do this work. 

“I’m doing it to preserve cultures, especially low-resource [languages],” Özden says. He tells me he has recently started collecting samples of Turkey’s smaller languages, such as Circassian and Zaza.

However, as I dug into the data set, I noticed that the coverage of languages and accents is very uneven. There are only 22 hours of Finnish voices from 231 people. In comparison, the data set contains 3,554 hours of English from 94,665 speakers. Some languages, such as Korean and Punjabi, are even less well represented. Even though they have tens of millions of speakers, they account for only a couple of hours of recorded data. 

This imbalance has emerged because data collection efforts are started from the bottom up by language communities themselves, says Lewis-Jong. 

“We’re trying to give communities what they need to create their own AI training data sets. We have a particular focus on doing this for language communities where there isn’t any data, or where maybe larger tech organizations might not be that interested in creating those data sets,” Lewis-Jong says. They hope that with the help of volunteers and various bits of grant funding, the Common Voice data set will have close to 200 languages by the end of the year.

Common Voice’s permissive license means that many companies rely on it—for example, the Swedish startup Mabel AI, which builds translation tools for health-care providers. One of the first languages the company used was Ukrainian; it built a translation tool to help Ukrainian refugees interact with Swedish social services, says Karolina Sjöberg, Mabel AI’s founder and CEO. The team has since expanded to other languages, such as Arabic and Russian. 

The problem with a lot of other audio data is that it consists of people reading from books or texts. The result is very different from how people really speak, especially when they are distressed or in pain, Sjöberg says. Because anyone can submit sentences to Common Voice for others to read aloud, Mozilla’s data set also includes sentences that are more colloquial and feel more natural, she says.

Not that it is perfectly representative. The Mabel AI team soon found out that most voice data in the languages it needed was donated by younger men, which is fairly typical for the data set. 

“The refugees that we intended to use the app with were really anything but younger men,” Sjöberg says. “So that meant that the voice data that we needed did not quite match the voice data that we had.” The team started collecting its own voice data from Ukrainian women, as well as from elderly people. 

Unlike other data sets, Common Voice asks participants to share their gender and details about their accent. Making sure different genders are represented is important to fight bias in AI models, says Rebecca Ryakitimbo, a Common Voice fellow who created the project’s gender action plan. More diversity leads not only to better representation but also to better models. Systems that are trained on narrow and homogenous data tend to spew stereotyped and harmful results.

“We don’t want a case where we have a chatbot that is named after a woman but does not give the same response to a woman as it would a man,” she says. 

Ryakitimbo has collected voice data in Kiswahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She tells me she wanted to collect voices from a socioeconomically diverse set of Kiswahili speakers and has reached out to women young and old living in rural areas, who might not always be literate or even have access to devices. 

This kind of data collection is challenging. The importance of collecting AI voice data can feel abstract to many people, especially if they aren’t familiar with the technologies. Ryakitimbo and volunteers would approach women in settings where they felt safe to begin with, such as presentations on menstrual hygiene, and explain how the technology could, for example, help disseminate information about menstruation. For women who did not know how to read, the team read out sentences that they would repeat for the recording. 

The Common Voice project is bolstered by the belief that languages form a really important part of identity. “We think it’s not just about language, but about transmitting culture and heritage and treasuring people’s particular cultural context,” says Lewis-Jong. “There are all kinds of idioms and cultural catchphrases that just don’t translate,” they add. 

Common Voice is the only audio data set where English doesn’t dominate, says Willie Agnew, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied audio data sets. “I’m very impressed with how well they’ve done that and how well they’ve made this data set that is actually pretty diverse,” Agnew says. “It feels like they’re way far ahead of almost all the other projects we looked at.” 

I spent some time verifying the recordings of other Finnish speakers on the Common Voice platform. As their voices echoed in my study, I felt surprisingly touched. We had all gathered around the same cause: making AI data more inclusive, and making sure our culture and language was properly represented in the next generation of AI tools. 

But I had some big questions about what would happen to my voice if I donated it. Once it was in the data set, I would have no control about how it might be used afterwards. The tech sector isn’t exactly known for giving people proper credit, and the data is available for anyone’s use. 

“As much as we want it to benefit the local communities, there’s a possibility that also Big Tech could make use of the same data and build something that then comes out as the commercial product,” says Ryakitimbo. Though Mozilla does not share who has downloaded Common Voice, Lewis-Jong tells me Meta and Nvidia have said that they have used it.

Open access to this hard-won and rare language data is not something all minority groups want, says Harry H. Jiang, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who was part of the team doing audit research. For example, Indigenous groups have raised concerns. 

“Extractivism” is something that Mozilla has been thinking about a lot over the past 18 months, says Lewis-Jong. Later this year the project will work with communities to pilot alternative licenses including Nwulite Obodo Open Data License, which was created by researchers at the University of Pretoria for sharing African data sets more equitably. For example, people who want to download the data might be asked to write a request with details on how they plan to use it, and they might be allowed to license it only for certain products or for a limited time. Users might also be asked to contribute to community projects that support poverty reduction, says Lewis-Jong.  

Lewis-Jong says the pilot is a learning exercise to explore whether people will want data with alternative licenses, and whether they are sustainable for communities managing them. The hope is that it could lead to something resembling “open source 2.0.”

In the end, I decided to donate my voice. I received a list of phrases to say, sat in front of my computer, and hit Record. One day, I hope, my effort will help a company or researcher build voice AI that sounds less generic, and more like me. 

This story has been updated.