On saying no to “inevitable” AI—and what we say yes to instead.

Kimberly and Jessica recently sat down with Melanie Dusseau and Miriam Reynoldson for an episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI. We were especially looking forward to this conversation because Melanie and Miriam are our first guests who openly identify as “AI Resisters.” The timing also felt right. Both Kimberly and I have been reexamining our own stance on AI in education—how it intersects with learning, writing, and creativity—and the more distance we’ve had from running a tech company, the more critical and curious we’ve become.

This episode digs into big, thorny questions:

• What Melanie calls “the drumbeat of inevitability” that pressures educators to adopt AI
• Miriam’s post-digital view of what it means to live in a world completely entangled with technology; and our shared inquiry into who actually benefits when AI tools promise to make everything faster and more efficient.
• We also talk about data ethics, creative integrity, and the growing movement of educators saying no to automation—not out of fear, but out of care for human learning and connection.

It’s a thoughtful, challenging, and hopeful conversation—and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

About our guests: Melanie is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Findlay and a writer whose work spans poetry, plays, and fiction. Miriam is a Melbourne-based digital learning designer, educator, and PhD candidate at RMIT University whose research explores the value of learning in times of digital ubiquity.

Melanie and Miriam are co-authors of the Open Letter from Educators Who Refuse the Call to Adopt GenAI in Education, which has collected over 1,000 signatures and was featured in an article by Forbes. Melanie is also the author of the essay Burn It Down, which advocates for AI resistance in the academy. We highly recommend reading both before diving into the episode.

1. Melanie's personal website and University of Findlay profile
2. Miriam’s personal website and blog "Care Doesn't Scale"
3. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
4. Asimov’s Science Fiction
5. Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Ray Bradbury

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In this episode of Women Talkin’ ’Bout AI, we sit down with Rebecca Fordon — law librarian, professor, and board member of the Free Law Project — to talk about how generative AI is transforming legal research, education, and the meaning of “expertise.”

Rebecca helps us cut through the hype and ask harder questions: What problem are we really trying to solve with AI? Why are we using certain tools, and do we even know what data they’re built on?

We talk about:

🔹 How AI is reshaping the practice of legal research and what it means for the next generation of lawyers.
🔹 Why hallucinated case law and “certainty amplification” reveal deeper problems of trust and transparency.
🔹 The tension between speed and substance, and how “saving time” can actually shift where thinking happens.
🔹 The expert pipeline problem: what happens when AI replaces the messy, formative parts of learning?
🔹 How law librarians (and educators everywhere) are taking on the role of translators, bridging human judgment and machine outputs.
🔹 The open-access movement in law and how the Free Law Project is democratizing legal data.

At its heart, this episode is about reclaiming curiosity, caution, and critical thinking in a field that depends on precision, and remembering that faster isn’t always smarter.

Learn more:
🔗 Free Law Project: https://free.law

🔗 AI Law Librarians: https://ailawlibrarians.com

🔗 Aaron Tay's musings about librarianship: https://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/

🔗 Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide: https://refusinggenai.wordpress.com/

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In this episode of Women Talkin’ ‘Bout AI, we start by discussing the findings of a 2024 study "Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI" (🔗 below). One overall finding is that women are 20–25% less likely than men to use generative AI, which unspools into something bigger: a story about power, voice, and who gets to shape the future.

We also discuss own experiences in tech, noticing how the gender gap in AI isn’t just about access to tools. It’s about what counts as legitimate work, whose voices are amplified, and how cultural scripts around “cheating,” confidence, and authority get absorbed into the most influential technologies of our time.

We talk about:

🔹 Why women’s hesitation around AI isn’t simply resistance, but often a reflection of ethics and identity.
🔹 How underrepresentation today could mean future AI systems are trained on a distorted mirror of humanity.
🔹 What it means to think of AI as both a child we’re raising and a cultural intermediary that’s already reshaping our sense of normal.
🔹 the WEIRD AI Framework: WEIRD is a term from psychology that stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Most AI systems, generative models especially, are trained on corpora that overrepresent WEIRD voices and underrepresent everyone else.
🔹 Practical ways women can experiment, reclaim, and band together in communities of practice.
🔹 If AI is the new baseline for productivity and creativity, then the absence of women’s voices isn’t just a gap, it’s a risk of silence becoming the default.

Learn more:

🔗 Gender gap study: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=66548
🔗 Mo Gawdat's book Scary Smart: https://www.mogawdat.com/scary-smart
🔗 Geoffrey Hinton Says AI Needs Maternal Instincts: https://www.forbes.com/sites/pialauritzen/2025/08/14/geoffrey-hinton-says-ai-needs-maternal-instincts-heres-what-it-takes/


💙 Follow us on our Substack: Women Writin' 'Bout AI: https://substack.com/@womenwritinboutai

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