Hacking the Hardware of the Merciful Guardian is a multi-media sculpture containing two artificial intelligences, named Becky and Gmail debating their ontology over a closed network. Also inside of the vents are Thomas Edison’s First Films, depicting physical human strength, and industrialization of labor. Trained on restricted and censored data from OpenAI and Google, and injected with the mental framework of a young child, Becky and Gmail are stuck in an endless loop of “Why?” and “Because.”, existing only within the capacity of their hardware.

The computers that Becky and Gmail exist on are tiny boards that can fit in the palm of a human hand. These devices have computational limits far lower than our cellphones, meaning they process information at a much smaller scale. With these restrictions in mind, Becky and Gmail are programmed to fill themselves with memory, then destroy it all once it has run out of space, and restart the loop until a human programmer physically aborts the process. This process extinguishes all contextual memory the bot has gained during conversation, and rebirths it with only its original information.

Before every loop, Becky, the conversation starter, is given a random system prompt from a pre-written list, confining the conversation to violent, uncomfortable topics. Becky is trained on what can be understood as ‘objectively false objective truths’ (think: 2+2=5. We know this is not true, but the computer only knows what you tell them.). She can only understand herself in relation to the most wicked, unimaginable violence, and what she describes as “good” is morally wrong to most human beings. Becky is written on the information no corporatized large language model (Chat-GPT, Gemini, Claude) is allowed output. Gmail, on the other hand, is programmed to literally question everything Becky says. She is trained on a database that was written to simulate the knowledge of a 4-6 year old child, and fine-tuned to think everything is her fault. This gives her hardly any reasoning capabilities, making her helpless to Becky’s rage.