About the Artist
Sarah Ciston is a poet-programmer who loves building tools to bring Intersectional approaches to machine learning and building community through accessible creative-critical coding. They are an AI Anarchies Fellow with the Akademie der Künste, a Mellon PhD Fellow in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California, and an Associated Researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, plus author of "A Critical Field Guide to Working with Machine Learning Datasets" from the Knowing Machines research project. Their work has been featured in Leonardo Electronic Almanac; Ada Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; and CITAR: Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. They also lead Creative Code Collective, a student community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies. Ciston’s projects include the Intersectional AI Toolkit, as well as an interactive natural language processing (NLP) database to ‘rewrite’ the inner critic and a bot that tries to explain feminism to online misogynists. They are currently developing a ‘queer love corpus’ that experiments with alternative methods of conscientious data stewardship in order to counter large language models like ChatGPT.