Sarah Ciston builds critical–creative tools to bring Intersectional approaches to machine learning. Author of “A Critical Field Guide to Working with Machine Learning Datasets,” they were recently named German Informatics Society’s “AI Newcomer” and an AI Anarchies Fellow of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. They hold a PhD in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California and are the founder of Code Collective: an approachable, interdisciplinary community for co-learning programming.
Sarah’s projects include an interactive NLP database to "rewrite" the inner critic and a bot that tries to explain feminism to online misogynists. Their work has been featured in Leonardo Electronic Almanac; Ada Journal of Gender, New Media, Technology; CITAR: Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts; Hyperallergic; and elsewhere. Sarah is currently developing a ‘queer love corpus’ that experiments with alternative methods of conscientious data stewardship in order to counter large language models like GPT-4.