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 also about following the questions. What is the outcome we actually want from this technology? And what happens to all of us when the people building it cannot answer that?

Topics Covered

• Why the dot-com bubble is the wrong analogy for AI infrastructure
• How special purpose vehicles and obfuscatory financing hide AI debt
• The Magnificent Seven and concentration risk in the S&P 500
• Taiwan, TSMC, and the helium supply chain most people have never heard of
• The "everything machine" promise and why it cannot pay for itself
• Why an AI crash could starve the narrowly-focused applications that actually work
• The labor reorganization problem and why generalists may win
• What chatbot tutors get wrong about teaching
• Mythos, the open source ecosystem, and concentration of access to powerful tools
• Why we keep analogizing ourselves to whatever technology we just built

Referenced in This Episode

• George Kamide and Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks
• Ed Zitron's reporting on AI infrastructure at Where's Your Ed At, including The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble and AI Bubble 2027
• Paul Kedrosky's analysis at Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy, which compares the AI buildout to past infrastructure booms
• David Shapiro's earlier appearance on the show, Beyond Work: Post-Labor Economics
• DeepLeaf, the Moroccan agritech company using AI to help small farmers detect crop disease
• The MIT Antibiotics-AI Project that used deep learning to discover a new structural class of antibiotics against MRSA
• Khan Academy's Khanmigo and the recent reckoning with the limits of LLM-based tutoring
• Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, and his New York Times op-ed It's the End of the Internet as We Know It on Mythos and open source access
• Michael Pollan's new book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

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 deepfake porn within a long pattern of systems failing to protect women and girls at scale.

They discuss a New York Times op-ed about a lawsuit involving three Tennessee teenagers whose yearbook photos were used to generate sexually explicit images and what the outcome of that case could mean for tech accountability. They also cover what parents can do, why law enforcement is struggling to keep up, and where to turn if you or someone you know has been victimized.

In this episode:

• What deepfakes are, and why "it's not real" doesn't reduce the harm
• The xAI/Grok class action lawsuit and the co-creator legal argument
• A quick history lesson: from the printing press to Facebook's origins as "FaceMash"
• Why the barrier to entry is the real game-changer
• What Elon Musk says about it — and why critics aren't buying it
• Open-source models with no guardrails
• The Take It Down Act and state-level deepfake legislation
• Resources for victims and what watermarking can and can't do
• Why talking to your kids matters (and why they probably know more than you)

Resources and Links

Primary episode sources:

• New York Times op-ed: Deepfake Nudes Are Harming Teens
• AP News: xAI/Grok lawsuit coverage
• Lieff Cabraser on the NYT op-ed and the lawsuit

Victim resources:

• StopNCII.org
• Sensity AI

Legislation and policy:

• The Take It Down Act (Latham & Watkins summary)
• State deepfake legislation tracker — Public Citizen

Context and background:

• Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire (Apple Podcasts)
• Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire (Spotify)
• University College Cork: Deepfake Real Harms — Six Myths
• AlgorithmWatch: Spain schoolboys and AI-generated fake nudes
• Laura Bates, The New Age of Sexism
• Brotopia by Emily Chang
• Gilded Rage by Jacob Silverman

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

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 informationally dense, formulaic, and stripped of hedging language
• The Porter and Jick letter and how a five-sentence note helped fuel the opioid epidemic through citation chaining
• What happens when AI scales the same kind of telephone game with scientific evidence
• How algorithmic silos and certainty amplification may be eroding our tolerance for nuance
• The difference between accuracy and complexity in writing, and why polished text is not the same as deep thinking
• Why smaller, well-vetted language models may produce better outcomes than massive ones trained on internet slop
• Neil Postman's idea that writing "freezes speech" and what that means in an era when fewer people are doing their own writing

Referenced in This Episode

• Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks podcast
• The Porter and Jick letter (1980) on opioid addiction
• Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
• James Marriott's essay on the post-literate society
• Derek Thompson, "The Decline of Thinking" (The Atlantic)
• OpenAI's Prism research tool

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/