Sarah Ciston - AI War Cloud Database (2025)

What responsibilities do you have when choosing AI tools that could lead to deadly outcomes on a massive scale? Can your use of new technologies be free of warfare? This project critically examines specific machine learning tasks used in military "AI Decision Support Systems" (AI-DSS). These are algorithms capable of automating critical choices in conflict situations, such as deciding who lives or dies. Sarah Ciston’s AI War Cloud Database catalogs systems that make automated decisions in warfare and shows where similar tools appear in smartphones and popular social platforms. By showing this, we can conclude that both tech creators and their users are complicit—which also suggests our power to choose or create different tools.

Sarah Ciston is Professor of Computational Thinking and Aesthetic Doing at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their artistic research builds tools to bring intersectional, critical–creative approaches to machine learning.