You: “What time is it?”
Earth: “I am the Earth, I am nature. Time is irrelevant to me.”
You: “Can you do anything about climate change?”
Earth: “Don’t forget, I am the Earth, I am nature. I will change, but it will affect you more than it will affect me. I am not responsible for your future. You are.”
If you had the Earth on the phone, what would you ask her? You might soon be able to do exactly that. The ‘Mother Earth Telephone’ works like a simple phone call, but behind it is an AI prototype that shares the perspective of our home planet.
The Mother Earth Telephone in action. AI slips into the role of our planet
The idea of bringing the Earth to a telephone was conceived for the Hackerton ‘Creative Lab for Climate Communication’ in the summer of 2022. At that point, there were only a few months left until the release of ChatGPT. “We asked ourselves how we could reach as many people as possible, and it was clear to us that what was missing above all was emotional communication. We should design something interactive in public spaces,” Falko Saalfeld, founder of the Mother Earth Telephone, told us. “The final idea of letting AI slip into the role of our ecosystem came to me by chance one night in a tent during a wild camping trip on the island of Rügen.” Shortly afterwards, Falko teamed up with programmer Mark Schatz to develop the Mother Earth Telephone as an AI prototype.
Falko Saalfeld (right) with programmer Mark Schatz. “We see enormous potential in the education sector, but also in the social sector and other storytelling formats,” says Saalfeld. Museums and other exhibition spaces would be especially interesting locations for this very special telephone connection. For example, museum-goers could engage with the Mother Earth Telephone in interactive exhibitions.
But who or what actually speaks as ‘Mother Earth’ here? The team behind Earth AI provided the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth’ (Cochabamba, Bolivia, Earth Day, 22 April 2010) to train the AI model in giving answers. Members of the Survival International association also provided support during the design phase. “Many environmental problems arise from our Western understanding of nature, resources and profits. Most large language models reproduce our perspective,” says Saalfeld. “That’s why we’re trying to teach the LLM wisdom and a connection to nature with the help of traditional sayings from indigenous groups. This data should be transparent and available.”
He also points out that there is currently a prevailing assumption in society that language models are ‘neutral’ tools. Ultimately, however, they reproduce the rules and data specified by programmers. Language models are also used politically to influence certain perspectives and discourses, especially on social media. “For our project, which deals with Indigenous knowledge and narratives, it is sometimes very difficult to train the language model to overcome its Eurocentric, Western perspective.”
Lack of linguistic diversity: Why AI systems reinforce global inequalities—and how we can change that
A lack of linguistic diversity means that modern AI systems exclude billions of people. This exacerbates economic, social and technological inequalities. But there is hope.
Saalfeld is currently developing the technology to enable larger-scale implementation. “We deliberately chose not to distribute prototypes in Germany that we wouldn’t be able to update easily.” The open-source approach makes the project globally scalable and means other developers can create their own Mother Earth Telephones in different languages.
Mother Earth Telephone could also give forests, oceans and mountains a voice
We asked Falko Saalfeld whether his model could also ‘speak’ as the forests, oceans and mountains. “Absolutely,” he says. “Telling a new story using AI is not a problem in itself. The work is more about making these stories consistent and logical for the AI and unlearning false narratives.”
And what about the sustainability of the model? AI, and language models in particular, are responsible for enormous energy consumption. However, while Big Tech relies on huge models, Earth AI is based on a different approach. “We train and host a small, specialised model centrally for all Mother Earth applications. This not only saves a lot of energy, but is also faster. For speech, we don’t use expensive streaming providers, but extremely efficient open source text-to-speech and speech-to-text models locally that don’t require graphics cards.”
Sustainable AI is about more than green data centres
What we see is only the tip of the iceberg. Every AI model has already had a long ‘life’ before it is even put to use — with massive implications for people and the environment. Truly resource-efficient and public-interest-oriented AI use and development must therefore take the entire life cycle of AI into account.
In 2023, the project won the K3 Award for Climate Communication, and in 2025, the team was invited to TED AI in Vienna. If developers are now curious and want to help, they are welcome to get in touch, says Falko Saalfeld. “Our goal is to build an international community, and we can only do that together.”
