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Mozilla’s multi-award winning podcast is back! In Season 7, Bridget Todd meets tech builders who put people over profit in artificial intelligence.

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Season 7

5: The Art of AI

From Hollywood to Hip Hop, artists are negotiating consent for use of AI in the creative industries. Bridget Todd speaks to artists who are pushing the boundaries. Show Notes

Published: December 5, 2023

From Hollywood to Hip Hop, artists are negotiating new boundaries of consent for use of AI in the creative industries. Bridget Todd speaks to artists who are pushing the boundaries.

It’s not the first time artists get squeezed, but generative AI presents new dilemmas. In this episode: a member of the AI working group of the Hollywood writers union; a singer who licenses use of her voice to others; an emcee and professor of Black music; and an AI music company charting a different path.

Van Robichaux is a comedy writer in Los Angeles who helped craft the Writers Guild of America’s proposals on managing AI in the entertainment industry.

Holly Herndon is a Berlin-based artist and a computer scientist who has developed “Holly +”, a series of deep fake music tools for making music with Holly’s voice.

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo creates video games and studies the intersection between AI and Hip Hop at Brown University. Her alias as a rapper is Sammus.

Rory Kenny is co-founder and CEO of Loudly, an AI music generator platform that employs musicians to train their AI instead of scraping music from the internet.

Thank you to Sammus for sharing her track ‘1080p.’ Visit Sammus’ Bandcamp page to hear the full track and check out more of her songs.

Episode transcript
  • 4: Lend Me Your Voice Listen now. November 21, 2023

    Big tech’s power over language, means power over people. Bridget Todd talks to language community leaders paving the way for voice AI in their own languages and dialects.

  • Why does it so often feel like we’re part of a mass AI experiment? What is the responsible way to test new technologies? Bridget Todd explores what it means to live with unproven AI systems that impact millions of people as they roll out across public life.

  • They’re the essential workers of AI — yet mostly invisible and exploited. Does it have to be this way? Bridget Todd talks to data workers and entrepreneurs calling for change.

  • Are today’s large language models too hot to handle? Bridget Todd digs into the risks and rewards of opening up the tech that makes ChatGPT talk.

  • This season, Bridget Todd meets people who are balancing the upsides of AI with the downsides coming into view worldwide. The first of five biweekly episodes launches on October 10!

Season 6

  • Life, death and data. AI’s capacity to support research on human health is well documented. But so are the harms of biased datasets and misdiagnoses. How can AI developers build healthier systems? We take a look at a new dataset for Black skin health, a Covid chatbot in Rwanda, AI diagnostics in rural India, and elusive privacy in mental health apps.

  • How can platforms stop disinformation that spreads like wildfire during elections? A record number of elections are taking place around the world in 2022. Voters’ social media feeds will be flooded with political, AI driven disinformation campaigns. Grassroots organizations are tackling the problem head on, aggressively tracking disinformation and hate speech and fighting AI with AI.

  • 3: AI from Above Listen now. August 15, 2022

    From above the clouds, our world is surveilled and datafied. Power over that data means power over what stories get told about people and places: whose needs are counted, whose needs are erased. How can people reclaim power over their own maps and stories using AI?

  • Gig workers around the world report directly to algorithms in precarious jobs created by secretive corporations. We take you to the streets of Quito, Ecuador where delivery workers are protesting against artificial intelligence, and we hear solutions from people in several countries on how to audit the algorithms and reclaim rights.

  • Where should tech builders draw the line on AI for military or surveillance? Just because it can be built, doesn't mean it should be. At what point do we blow the whistle, call out the boss, and tell the world? Find out what it's like to sound the alarm from inside a big tech company.

  • Meet IRL's new host, Bridget Todd, who is on a journey to meet people around the world who are making AI more trustworthy, in real life.

Season 5

Season 4

Season 3

Season 2

Season 1