Women talkin' 'bout AI

Guest : Dr. Michelle Morkert — gender scholar, leadership coach, founder of the Women's Leadership Collective . In this repisode (get it? re-episode?), Kimberly and Jessica sit down with Dr. Michelle Morkert to unpack the growing call from AI leaders for "maternal AI," which is the idea that treating AI systems like children we're raising will make them safer, kinder, and less...

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 this conversation because the issue has become urgently local. Across the United States, communities are debating whether proposed data centers are good economic...

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 that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated rela...

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 brings a corpus linguistics lens to large language models, reframing them as pattern-recognition systems trained on messy, biased “corpora” of the web. Her early...

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 internal grants, release time, her kids' summer camp rush, and student needs and Kimberly tracing her own path out of Moxie, the AI feedback startup...

When Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas , his landmark encyclical on AI and human dignity, it lit up LinkedIn, Substacks, and newsfeeds worldwide. Kimberly read it the morning it dropped. Jessica, whose complicated relationship with religious institutions runs deep, read it anyway. And both of us had the same reaction as Abi Awomosu's : women have been saying this, uncited.  In this ep...

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. Research shows people correctly identify synthetic voice only about 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip. In this co-host deep dive, Kimberly and J...

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 inevitability about AI, and the way that projection strips the rest of us of our agency. Julia is a sociologist and has held senior roles at the European Commission and the G20.  We talk about why so many AI adoption strategies are measuring...

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 ones punishing us when we do? This week, Kimberly and Jessica talk with Nikki Meller, founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred AI, a member of the Tech Cou...

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 builds a surprisingly intuitive explanation of what quantum computers actually do and why they matter for the future of AI. But the episode starts somewhere else,...

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 builder, and co-host of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks , to look past the headlines about the AI bubble and ask who actually has skin in the game. This is an episode about following the money, but it is al...

Episode Summary In 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 lawsuit against Elon Musk's xAI/Grok to a history of technology being used to harm women dating back to the printing press, this conversation situates deep...

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 How Kimberly's research compared AI-generated abstracts to human-written ones in nursing journals and what the key linguistic differences were Why AI text tends to be informational...

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 human translator doesn't swap words one for one, AI mediates the way we understand the world. It shapes what we write, what we trust, and what we treat...

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 Innovation Officer with a background in communication strategy and leadership consulting. They invited Rebecca to dig into one of the most unsettling questions of this moment: how do we make decisions when we can n...

Jessica and Kimberly sit down with Heather Mellquist Lehto, PhD.  Heather is a mathematician, anthropologist, former Harvard faculty, Vatican AI advisor, and founder of Guilded AI. They asked her to pull back the curtain on data annotation: the human labor that makes AI possible and one of the least visible, least understood, and most exploited parts of the entire industry. From pennies-per-task g...

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 Inside Work and Relational Intelligence chapter lead at Culture First . Valerie works with employees and organizations navigating the human side of AI adoption, and she brings both an organizational psychology perspective and a...

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 harmed when we use it carelessly, and whether the systems we're building deserve our trust. In this episode, Clara breaks down what AI governance...

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" phenomenon. From naming our Roombas to the millions of people in romantic entanglements with apps like Replica, we explore what happens wh...

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 language we use to talk about AI, why it matters, and what we might be underestimating when we make it sound cute and harmless. From there, Kimberly...

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 using AI changes the whole conversation, they dig into the tension between optimistic narratives and the critical questions no one seemed t...

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 think pieces can't quite reach. Mark, a professor of ethics and leadership, brings a philosopher's lens to the biggest questions AI is forcing us to confron...

This week, Kimberly Becker and Jessica Parker dig into the “AI bubble”—why it keeps inflating even as skepticism grows inside the industry. We unpack the growing disconnect between massive investment and unclear payoffs, including a widely discussed Goldman Sachs research question: what $1 trillion problem will AI actually solve?   From there, we connect the dots between two very different narrati...

In this episode, Kimberly and Jessica debrief Jessica’s interview with Arlyn (founder of Tobey’s Tutor) and unpack what it looks like to build AI products as “non-technical” founders. They reflect on their own journey building Moxie: bootstrapping vs raising money, the pressure-cooker effect of investors, the messy realities of UX/UI and platform migration, the world of APIs and subscriptions, and...

In this episode of Women talkin’ ’bout AI , Jessica sits down with Arlyn Gajilan, founder of Tobey’s Tutor, an AI-powered learning support platform she originally built for her son, who has ADHD and dyslexia. This conversation is a deep dive into what it actually looks like to build an AI product as a non-technical, bootstrapped founder, from vibe coding and early prototypes to onboarding, safety...