A new approach to AI data puts communities in charge

Much of what AI knows about the world comes from data most people never see and from technical processes that determine what’s included or left out.

As AI becomes increasingly influential in daily life, a new platform aims to help communities participate in that foundation being built behind the scenes to ensure they’re portrayed accurately and fairly, especially in imagery. Called the Community Library Creator, the Microsoft research effort gives groups a structured way to help shape how they show up in AI-generated pictures.

“There isn’t a ground truth for how people should be represented,” says Anja Thieme, a principal researcher at Microsoft with a background in social psychology and human-computer interaction. “It needs to be collectively defined and negotiated.”

Communities are building their own libraries instead of relying on patchy data that exists online, using the new tool to help them define what good representation looks like and build the data around it in a way AI models and systems can learn from to better reflect their existence.

What is a community library?

A community library is a collection of images or videos created by a group of people with shared experiences — such as a disability, identity or lived perspective — working together through advocacy organizations to show how they want to be represented in AI. Each image is paired with descriptions that explain what matters about it, adding context that helps AI systems understand not just what something looks like, but what it represents from the community’s perspective.

The Community Library Creator software, developed by Thieme and her team alongside Microsoft’s Accessibility Team, provides the tools and structure to help guide that process. But the choices about what to include, emphasize or change come from the community itself. The result is a resource that can be used to help AI systems learn from more diverse lived experience, not just patterns in data scraped from the internet.