Will AI Ever Know?
A Participatory Archive of Sensory Joy
Will AI Ever Know? is a participatory artwork and speculative dataset. It takes the form of a scientific instrument that can never fully do its job — a database trained on something computation was never built to hold: sensory joy.
The project collects multimodal records of a single ritual: eating an orange in the shower. Inspired by a 2015 Reddit thread that became a spontaneous archive of collective euphoria, the work extends that impulse into machine learning, asking what happens when affective experience is submitted as training data.
The result is both a growing archive and a gentle provocation — about what AI can know, what it cannot know, and which questions we decide are worth asking in the first place.
What counts as legitimate data? The shower is a site where vision and sound — the senses computation prioritizes — are obscured. We are forced to collect differently.
Joy, absurdity, and care are re-centered as valid metrics. The dataset is not ancillary to the work; it is the work.
By attempting to train an AI on something it may never fully understand, the piece reveals the asymmetry between human experience and machine representation — not as failure, but as the point.
Each submitted entry is passed to a language model with a structured prompt. The model is asked to describe what it understands about the experience, and — crucially — what it cannot understand.
This creates a record not just of the experience, but of what the system makes of the experience. The gap between the two is the artwork's central question made visible.
A running “AI comprehension estimate” on the archive reflects this uncertainty. It fluctuates. It never reaches 100%. It may trend downward as the dataset grows more complex.
All entries are available for download as structured data. The dataset is public, citable, and may be used for research. Contributors have consented to inclusion in a public artwork and potential training dataset.
Created by Cyan. Version 0.1.
“What would it mean to build a body of human joy, one orange at a time?”