Time well spent dismantling your black box(es): for all watched over by cookie monsters of loving grace

Cookie Monster

As AI develops, its demand for data increases. Data to AI is like a cookie to the always-hungry cookie monster. It’s thought process when learning or making decisions gets increasingly harder to interpret the more data it consumes. This mysterious process is referred to as a ‘black box’. This idea, however, extends beyond the mathematical. AI’s environmental costs, energy consumption and the misalignment between its values and ours, are all their own respective black boxes. In a series of absurd performative video essays, Yufei Gao embodies the cookie monster to demonstrate how it operates and consumes. The video installation is a research project that aims to understand the cookie monster and its impact on the world.