Artist: Sarah Ciston

Genre: Installation

What responsibilities do users and makers have in choosing AI tools, when their development can also lead to deadly outcomes at massive scales? AI War Cloud Database catalogues the systems used to make automated decisions in warfare, and it maps where the same types of tools appear in smartphones and popular social platforms. It builds a taxonomy of AI decision-making systems, shows how they are used in both military and commercial contexts, and tracks which nations and corporations are collaborating to deploy them. It offers an interactive interface for interrogating both automated warfare and politics of familiar technologies.

Artist Bio:

Sarah Ciston (they) is an artist-researcher building tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning. Their “AI War Cloud Database” won Ars Electronica’s 2025 STARTS Grand Prize. Sarah has held fellowships at Akademie der Künste Berlin, Center for Advanced Internet Studies, and Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. They were also named a 2023 "AI Newcomer" by Gesellschaft für Informatik. They are the author of “A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets” and co-author of Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press 2026).