Women talkin' 'bout AI
Two women examining AI through a lens of power, not just capability. Why deepfakes target women. How bias gets baked in. What tech companies aren't saying. Kimberly brings corpus linguistics; Jessica brings strategy. Both bring skepticism, feminism, research expertise, and a refusal to take the hype at face value.
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Episodes
60 episodes
Women Talkin' 'Bout Friction
Devon Cantwell-Chavez studies global urban climate change governance. She and Kimberly met because of an antagonistic LinkedIn post (not between the two of them), and then discovered that, in many wa...
It's Not X, It's Y: Why AI Chatbots Pick Weird Favorite Phrases
This week, Kimberly and Jessica dig into the AI writing tic everyone's noticed and nobody can fully explain: "it's not X, it's Y." They discuss The Atlantic's new piece on the phrase, then bring Kimberly's informal research from a publ...
Remainder Humanism & Language Machines
Every time a machine catches up to us, we redraw the line around what makes us human — and call whatever's left the "remainder." This week, Jessica and Kimberly (no guest) dig into Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Hum...
Mothering the Machine: Feminist Theory Meets Silicon Valley's Newest Metaphor
Guest: Dr. Michelle Morkert — gender scholar, leadership coach, founder of the Women's Leadership Collective.In this...
AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard
AI doesn’t live in “the cloud.” It lives in buildings: large, energy-hungry, water-dependent facilities that require land, cooling systems, backup power, utility agreements, zoning decisions, and public infrastructure.We’re re-releasing ...
Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing
We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace ...
Confidently Wrong: AI, Uncertainty, and Open Source
This is a special episode of WTBAI in which Kimberly sits down with her former colleague Derek Hanson to unpack what language research reveals about today’s AI systems, and together they consider where builders risk going wrong.Kimberly ...
Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment
In this episode, Kimberly Becker and Professor Laura Dumin pull back the curtain on motherhood, higher ed burnout, and AI's effects on teaching. They talk pretty candidly about midcareer life with Laura sharing the reality of juggling three int...
The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having
When Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his landmark encyclical on AI and human dignity, it lit up LinkedI...
AI Voice Cloning: Trust, Persuasion, and Who's at Risk
When you call your bank, your doctor's office, or your financial planner, the voice that greets you may have been deliberately engineered to make you feel safe, calm, and compliant — and you almost certainly can't tell.
The Certainty Trap: Why the AI Future Isn't Already Written
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Julia Stamm, founder and CEO of She Shapes AI, to unpack "The Certainty Trap." The way tech leaders project ...
The AI Adoption Trap: Why Women's Hesitation Is Rational — and Who's Really Responsible for Fixing It
We keep being told the problem is women's hesitation around AI, that we need to adopt faster, skill up, and get in the game. But what if the hesitation is the rational response? And what if the systems telling us to move faster are the same one...
Quantum Computing and AI (and Who Gets to Explain Things)
In this episode, Jessica teaches Kimberly quantum computing — and we mean that literally. Starting from classical bits and working through superposition, Schrödinger's cat, the observer effect, and Google's Willow chip, Jessica build...
The Everything Machine and the Trillion-Dollar Bet
What if the story we're being told about AI's inevitability is hiding something underneath? In this episode, Jessica and Kimberly sit down with George Kamide, anthropologist, community bu...
AI-Generated Deepfake Porn and the Fight for Accountability: It's About Power not Sex
Episode SummaryIn this episode, Kimberly and Jessica dig into the rising crisis of AI-generated deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), and why it's not really a technology story. It's a power story. From a class action l...
AI Took the Doubt Out of the Writing. That's the Problem.
Kimberly Becker joins George and George on the Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks podcast to talk about what our research is revealing about the language AI produces and what it means for the rest of us. Topics Covered...
Depth is the Human Edge
Jessica and Kimberly just had a paper accepted for publication in Frontiers in Education. So today, they're sharing what they've learned.The big idea is that AI is not a neutral tool. It's a cultural intermediary. Just like a hu...
Deepfakes and Doubt: How to Lead When AI Is Changing Everything
Jessica and Kimberly sit down with Rebecca Bultsma, an AI ethics researcher completing her dissertation in Data and AI Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, keynote speaker, and Chief ...
Data Annotation: The Human Labor Behind AI with Heather Mellquist Lehto, PhD
Jessica and Kimberly sit down with Heather Mellquist Lehto, PhD. Heather is a mathematician, anthropologist, former Harvard faculty, Vatican AI advisor, and founder ...
The Soft Skills Aren't Soft: Relational Intelligence, Workplace Culture, and What AI Can't Replace
What does it mean to do meaningful work? And what happens to that meaning when AI enters the picture?This week we're joined by Valerie Morris, co-host of the podcast
Is Anyone Steering This Thing? Clara Hawking on AI Governance
AI governance sounds like something for IT departments and government committees. It's not. According to computer scientist, philosopher, and AI governance expert Clara Hawking, it's really about behavior — how we use technology, who gets harme...
AI Companions ... Feeding on The Loneliness Economy
If the human race was "dying from disconnection" a hundred years ago, what does it mean that we now seek solace in non-embodied algorithms? In this episode, Kimberly sits down with researcher Tricia Friedman to deconstruct the "Companion AI" ph...
Bot, Agent, Assistant: Why the Language We Use for AI Is Never Neutral
This week's episode starts where a lot of good conversations do, with someone asking a deceptively simple question. Kimberly's husband wanted to know what a bot actually is, and that one question opens up a pretty wide conversation about the la...
AI and the Patriarchy Ladder
Jessica and Kimberly debrief their experience at a women-in-AI conference at Vanderbilt Law, and what they saw didn't match the trillion-dollar hype. From the "gap vs. trap" framing of women's AI adoption to why being penalized 26% more for usi...
Consciousness, Capitalism, and Coexistence: What Fiction Reveals About Our AI Future
What happens when a grieving professor encounters what she believes is a conscious AI? In this episode, we sit down with Mark Peres, author of The Accord, to explore how fiction helps us grapple with questions that policy papers and th...