Women talkin' 'bout AI

Show notes We’re revisiting our earlier conversation about Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification—the process by which digital platforms begin by serving users, then shift toward serving business customers, and eventually extract value from everyone involved. When we first recorded this episode, Doctorow’s new book about AI had not yet been published. It is out now: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before It’s Too Late. We’ll be d...

AI-generated deepfakes are getting easier to create, harder to detect, and increasingly being used to target women and children. So who is responsible for stopping the harm: Big Tech, Congress, or the rest of us? In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, Kimberly Becker talks with Allyson Kapin, founder of Women Who Tech, co-founder of the W Fund, and founder of RAD Campaign, about AI deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate imagery, misinformation, online scams, tech regulation, and political powe...

Kimberly and Jessica are taking a short break from new episodes, so this week we're re-airing one of our favorites, our conversation with Clara Hawking. Clara is a computer scientist, philosopher, and AI governance expert working in K-12 and beyond. Why now? Since we recorded this, the law Clara champions in this episode has crossed the finish line. On August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act became fully enforceable, making the EU the first jurisdiction to impose comprehensive, binding regulation on AI...

Jessica Parker returns to the show (ha!) for a conversation about Screen People by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber. The book examines how American life has reorganized itself around screens, and what happens when we can no longer reliably distinguish people from performers or information from entertainment. We trace Garber’s argument from Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” through Neil Postman’s “the medium is the metaphor” to her own claim that “the medium is the moral.” And w...

Part two of two with Roz Hirsch. Roz has been applying for jobs and not getting interviews she would once have gotten easily. She's been rejected in under an hour. She's been rejected at midnight, by companies where nobody was awake to read anything. Her expertise is language assessment, so she makes the argument nobody else is making. A resume is an assessment. Assessments require a validity argument, meaning evidence that the decisions you make with them are the right decisions. Validity is...