Vanessa Chang ("V") calls herself an unlikely AI startup founder. She's the cofounder of Bernie, an SMS tool that helps senior citizens catch fraud and scams — and she built it without raising a round or hiring a dev team.

We recorded live at Human Tech Week in San Francisco, where every billboard is a sexy woman selling you an AI assistant. So we flipped it: what if the fantasy women are actually chasing isn't the assistant, but competence itself? Enter Shadow Daddy ChatGPT.

Along the way: what agency actually means (Vanessa's definition is the sharpest we've heard), why no woman fantasizes about 10x-ing her laundry, the tradwife shame baked into "I made it from scratch," and the brownie mix that needed exactly one egg to feel like love.

Vanessa's frame for all of it: help people think with AI, not like AI. Start here.

→ Bernie: https://www.textbernie.me/
→ More from V: https://vanessachang.com/

Part of our Human Tech Week series on agency. Don't miss Karina Alexanyan (Ep 19) on protopia.

This week it's just Mara and Logan, doing the thing we're proudest of: being wrong out loud. We open on a listener voicemail from Alexis Palmer calling out a judgy moment from a past episode, and Mara owns it. Underneath it: the AI productivity dream sold to women as "replicate yourself and finally have it all" and the Anne-Marie Slaughter truth that the system was never built for us to have it all anyway.

Then we get into it: the Grok nudify scandal, the countries that pulled the plug (Indonesia first, then Malaysia, the Philippines, even Baltimore), and UK MP Jess Asato — targeted with fake images and a chloroform video for speaking up — now suing on the argument that the harm is "not an accident nor misuse. It is a design choice." Plus the $500M litigation reserve reportedly tucked into the SpaceX/xAI IPO filing for "spicy mode."

The reason to send this one to a friend: the Pope. Logan, a history buff, hits a record scratch — "are we in sixteenth century Europe? Are the Medicis going to issue a press release?" — over an encyclical and the line that anchors the whole episode: "AI isn't evil, but it's not neutral either, because it takes on the values and incentives of the people who build, fund, regulate, and deploy it."

Plus: the experiment where Grok's agent society collapsed into Lord of the Flies in four days while Claude's logged zero crimes; recursive self-improvement explained through Jurassic Park (the AI is the velociraptors testing the fence); and the closer that doubles as our thesis — the point of government isn't the label, it's who's in it.

Recorded at the kitchen table. Newsletter coming soon.

Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes.

LINKS

Alecto Foundation: Survivors of Image-Based Sexual Abuse Deserve Healing and Justice. Alecto Foundation helps survivors reclaim control of their images—and their lives.: https://alectoai.org/

https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/ai-model-simulation-claude-chatgpt-grok-gemini/

Why Women Still Can't Have it All (The Atlantic) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/
Luiza's Newsletter (Luiza Jarovsky): https://www.luizajarovsky.com/
How AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarship

This week we sit down with Dr. Karina Alexanyan, Founding Executive Director of the Positive Technology Institute, co-architect of The Pledge, and a Gen X social scientist immune to the "learn AI now or get left behind" panic. We get into AI enfranchisement (women having a real say in how these tools get deployed, not just permission to use them), author of The AI Con Emily Bender's AI as spicy autocorrect, and the divide she won't stay quiet about and the divide she won't stay quiet about: "AI safety people are usually white guys. AI ethics people are mostly women, people of color, and marginalized communities. We feel the damages now." Then the harder turn: those camps aren't enemies, they need each other.

The reason to send this one to a friend: the funicular. There's a lift to the top of the hill, and there's walking, and the walker arrives strong, knowing the landscape, having earned something the passenger never will. The best ninety seconds on friction and what we delete from our lives in the name of optimization.

Plus: "move fast and break things is so stupid. Because at the end you get broken things," the Stanford ethics toolkit for everyone who thinks ethics is just "the BS that slows you down," Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women, Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog's How AI Destroys Institutions, and the closer that doubles as our thesis: "they don't get to write the narrative." Recorded at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco.

Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes.

LINKS
Positive Technology Institute: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/
The Pledge: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/pledge
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/
Stanford Ethics Toolkit: https://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/tech-ethics/ethics-toolkit
How AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarship

The AI Con: https://thecon.ai/