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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In this episode, we open up about something we haven’t shared publicly before: our decision to shut down Moxie, the startup we spent years building.

We talk honestly about what led to that choice—the excitement of early growth, the challenges of raising money as non-technical founders, and the impossible reality of competing with free tools from tech giants like Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

This isn’t just a story about one company. It’s about trust, expertise, failure, and the messy human side of working with generative AI in education and research. Along the way, we reflect on what we wish we’d known earlier, how burnout shaped our decisions, and what we’ve learned about ourselves through the process of letting go.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why we ultimately decided to shut down Moxie
• The pressures of fundraising and pitching as non-technical founders
• The gap between hype and reality with AI in education
• Lessons on trust, expertise, and failure in both startups and academia
• How we’re processing life and work after Moxie

If you’ve ever wondered what it really feels like to close the doors on something you’ve poured yourself into, or you’re navigating your own questions about AI, startups, or burnout—you’ll find some resonance here.

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Today we sit down with Dr. Leslie Gruis — mathematician, NSA veteran, and author of The Privacy Pirates — to talk about the urgent importance of protecting personal information in our tech-driven world.

From children’s online privacy to the rise of corporate data exploitation, Dr. Gruis shares both her insider experience from decades in national security and her practical advice for safeguarding our digital lives.

📚 About our guest:

• First president of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society
• Contributor to U.S. Cyber Command & National Intelligence Council
• Author of The Privacy Pirates: Pirates of Personal Data
• Mentor and advocate for STEM students

🔑 In this episode you’ll learn:

• Why privacy is essential to democracy
• The risks kids face with school-issued laptops & smartphones
• How corporations collect and exploit our personal data
• What parents and educators can do today to protect children
• The ethical questions surrounding AI, surveillance, and data use

🎙️ Show Notes & Topics we cover:

• Defining informational privacy in the 21st century
• Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (and why it’s outdated)
• School-issued laptops and surveillance concerns
• Corporate data collection, sentiment analysis, and manipulation
• The asymmetric power between consumers and corporations
• Why protecting privacy is vital for democracy

🔗 Links

• Buy The Privacy Pirates
• Follow Dr. Leslie Gruis
• Follow Women Talking About AI:
  • 📺 YouTube
  • 📰 Substack

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Summary

In this conversation, Jessica and Kimberly interview David Shapiro to explore the concept of Post-Labor Economics. They discuss the implications of automation and AI on traditional job structures, the need for new economic measurements, and the evolving social contract. They explore the potential of Universal Basic Income and the importance of education in preparing future generations for a changing economy. The discussion emphasizes the need for a shift in how we perceive work, productivity, and personal fulfillment in a world increasingly dominated by technology.

Takeaways

• Post-Labor Economics examines the impact of automation on traditional jobs.
• Automation has historically decoupled productivity from human labor.
• The misconception that technology always creates new jobs is prevalent.
• AI's rapid advancement poses challenges for job security.
• Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a potential solution for economic displacement.
• Current economic measurements like GDP may not reflect true societal well-being.
• The social contract is evolving as labor becomes less central to identity.
• Education must adapt to focus on empathy, communication, and critical thinking.
• A garden mentality encourages ongoing personal growth rather than a linear life path.
• Rethinking work and meaning is essential in a post-labor society.

Links

• Rest Is Resistance: Free Yourself from Grind Culture and Reclaim Your Life Book by Tricia Hersey (https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/)
• David's LinkTree
• David's YouTube Channels
• David's SubStack
• Women Writin' 'Bout AI Substack

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In this episode, hosts Jessica and Kimberly are joined by Dr. Juliana Peloche, global educator and senior AI literacy advisor at Edith Cowan University. With over 20 years of cross-cultural teaching experience in Brazil, Chile, and Australia, Juliana shares how a curious 12-year-old student sparked her journey into AI education. Together, they explore why AI literacy is more than a technical skill—it's a foundation for critical thinking, equity, and ethics in the classroom. From digital basics like knowing what a browser is, to reimagining how we assess learning in the age of AI, this episode dives deep into how we can better prepare educators and students for a tech-saturated future—without losing our humanity.

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🎧 Episode Summary

Dr. Tamara Tate joins Jessica and Kimberly to talk about AI, education, and the evolving role of writing in a world where students can co-write with machines. Tamara shares how she transitioned from a 17-year legal career into education research, what she’s learning through the development of Papyrus AI, and why feedback, voice, and agency matter more than ever. The conversation covers everything from AI literacy and middle school classrooms to the complexities of funding, parent engagement, and what it really means to “offload” learning. It’s a thoughtful, practical look at how generative AI is reshaping writing instruction—and why it’s not just about speed, but meaning.

🔗 Show Notes Links

• Tamara Tate – UC Irvine Profile: https://education.uci.edu/people/tamara-tate/
• Digital Learning Lab: https://digitallearninglab.org
• GenAIED.org – Generative AI in Education Resources: https://genaied.org
• Anna Mills – AI & Writing Pedagogy: https://annamills.net
• Sarah Elaine Eaton – Post-Plagiarism Framework: https://drsaraheaton.wordpress.com

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