Erica: Have you ever read an AI headline late at night that you stumbled upon when you're doom scrolling through your phone, and then you just thought about the next generation? I mean, whether or not you have kids, I like to think that everybody's thinking about what's going on with the future, right? Because what I'm seeing now is all of these headlines that just say the technology's gonna wipe out humanity, it's taking over the world, and then I think about my eight-year-old who's just fast asleep wondering, “What is this world that I'm handing her?”

Now, today, y'all, I am turning the temperature all the way up because I wanna talk about who is selling us all of this fear and why it works so well for them. I wanna talk about what happens when almost no women are in the rooms where AI gets built, and I wanna talk about the next generation, our kids, and what do we owe them right now while this whole thing is being shaped.

Now, y'all, I am gonna drop some names on here, and I am gonna bring receipts, and I am telling you exactly where I stand because you already know I'm pro-women, and you already know I'm not pro Agent Orange.

Welcome to Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, the podcast where we stop playing small, start calling things out, and actually do something about it. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, executive coach, speaker, and a little bit of a movement maker, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there.

All right, y'all, welcome back to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors Podcast. If you're watching me on YouTube, you might notice this is a different vibe, and you're right because guess what? I'm in my house, and I'm alone, and there's no kids. They're at school. There's no husband. He went out. It's just me and my pooch, and I thought, “Why not work from my kitchen counter?” And that's what I wanted to do.

So if you're not watching on YouTube, hey, go check it out. See what this looks like. But this is a solo episode, and it is a spicy one, so if you have little ears in the back, you might want to put a headphone in or save it for later. But here we go, y'all.

I wrote The AI Gap. You know that. It is out, it is live, and I teach women leaders and corporate teams how to use AI efficiently, ethically, and in a way that moves them forward.

I use it every single day, multiple times a day. Now, I am also a mom of an 11-year-old and an eight-year-old, and lately, those two parts of me have been having this very loud argument going on in my head because we already know I'm an AI nerd, and that AI nerd in me sees what this technology can do, and it is fricking incredible.

But the mom in me reads these headlines, and I just wanna take all the technology I have in the house and toss it in the lake. And so today I'm gonna settle an argument with you, and I want to sort the real risks, like what we actually need to be concerned about, from the manufactured ones, and I wanna call out the people making money off of our fear, and I'm going to give you three moves that you can make this week that put you in the rooms where this entire machine gets shaped.

So let's be real. The fear is everywhere, especially this month, okay? AI is coming for your job. AI is coming for your kids. AI might decide that one day humans are the problem. Y'all, there's even a book out there that's called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and that is the title. But y'all, all of this talk about AI, because it is everywhere, it follows our kids to school, at least it does for mine.

And last year when Hudson was in fifth grade, he came home and he told me that one of his teachers basically said, “I hate everything AI. Everything about it is terrible.” And I was like, “Y'all, this is the fifth grade.” They were barely even using computers, definitely not even in Gmail, okay? And that really kinda made me feel a certain way because in my house I obviously love this stuff.

I think it's one of the most powerful tools that my kids will ever get their hands on. And then he walks out the door and a grownup man that he looks up to and trusts is telling him it's awful. Now listen, I have so much respect for teachers. They are carrying such an enormous load all the time, and a lot of them are watching kids use AI and totally skip over the critical thinking.

Now, I get where that comes from, but I don't want my son hearing from people that he knows, likes, and trusts that this is a bad thing because I don't want him to hesitate. Now listen, we know this story. We have lived it as women. If we hesitate, if we wait until we feel ready, if we wait until we're sure that we won't look silly, we won't make a mistake, those skill gaps compound.

Now, in The AI Gap, I talk about skill velocity. The earlier you start, the faster your skills compound. Skill velocity drives visibility. Visibility drives promotion. Promotion drives your pay. Every month that you hesitate and you don't go all the way in on this thing, that whole chain starts later. So I refuse to hand that hesitation to my kids, y'all.

They are growing up right in the middle of this. Hudson is 11 now, we're in the sixth grade. He has a Gmail account, but in two years he's gonna be a teenager, and Pew Research says almost two out of three teens in this country have already used an AI chatbot. About three in 10 use one every single day, and just over half of them use it for schoolwork.

Now, not only that, but there is also a data point that says 12% say that they have turned to a chatbot for emotional support. And y'all, I was teaching a room full of women today, and one of them said they use it as a marriage counselor and a therapist. I get it. But kids telling a chatbot how they feel? Maybe not processing it in the best way?

I don't know that that's the best use of it, right? But we have to just understand that the next generation is already using it, and the question right now is: who gets to shape what they're using? So I want you to notice something. A lot of the scariest things that are said about AI come from the men building it.

Now, in 2023, the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic signed a one-sentence statement saying the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, right up there with pandemics and nuclear war. Extinction, y'all, and they put their names on that, and then they went back to the office, and they raced each other to build it faster.

What? Okay. All right. I want to be fair. Some of the people who signed that statement are researchers who have been worried about this for years, and I respect the hell out of that. But when the CEOs selling the product tell you it could end the world, I want you to ask one question: Who benefits when we're scared?

Because fear does two things for them. It makes you feel small, like this is way above your pay grade, and you should probably leave it to the tech geniuses and all those bros, and it makes them look like they are the only ones who are smart enough to save us from the very thing they are selling. And y'all, that's a damn good business model, right?

So watch where the money goes. There's a super PAC called Leading the Future, and it has reportedly raised about $140 million for these midterms, and its mission is electing people who want AI rules light and one national standard that overrides all the tougher state laws. So the big donors here include venture firm capital.

It's gonna be Andreessen Horowitz and the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, and his wife. And OpenAI says the company doesn't direct that PAC. Hmm, okay. Well, filings also show that the Brockmans gave $25 million to MAGA Incorporated. Yes, Make America Great Again, y'all. So the industry warns us about extinction, and then the industry's money builds a nine-figure war chest to keep the rules light.

Now, I'm sorry y'all, but that's total bullsh*t, and I think you know it too.

So let's talk a little bit about Washington because this is where I get real hot, y'all. Our president likes to talk about protecting kids from AI, and the White House AI framework does lead with child safety, so okay, I'll clap for that, right?

But last December, he signed an executive order that set up a Justice Department task force to challenge state AI laws in court, and then dangled federal funding over states that pass the rules that administration calls onerous. Right? Now, he did carve out child safety laws, right?

The state child safety laws, and I will also give him that, but the states are where a lot of the AI rules in this country are getting written right now because they can do it faster, and that order is built to push them back. So then we gotta talk about China. Quick pause, because a lot of people don't know who NVIDIA is.

I didn't know for the longest time, and you absolutely need to know. But NVIDIA, N-V-I-D-I-A, started out making graphics chips for video games. Your kids might know about it, okay? Today, all right, those same chips are what you need to train AI, and those chips today are the engines inside the giant data centers that run AI, and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world.

Y'all, it is worth more than five trillion dollars. Woo. So if AI is a gold rush, NVIDIA sells the shovels, y'all. So for years, the rallying cry in Washington has been that we cannot let China win this AI race, and that was the reason that we had to move so fast. That was the reason to keep the rules light.

So what did this administration do? It went ahead and said, “You know what, NVIDIA? Go ahead, sell those chips, one of the most powerful chips, the H200, to Chinese companies, but let's make it so that the US government takes a 25% cut.” What? Okay. The first shipments landed in China this summer. All right?

ByteDance, B-Y-T-E Dance, the company that's behind TikTok, and Tencent each got roughly 10,000 of them. So I wanna make sure that I have this right. We can't slow down because of China. States can't write their own rules because of China. But then we can sell China the shovels as long as we get a cut? Hell no, y'all.

Hell no. Now, I want you to remember this past February when it felt like everybody you knew was just going crazy. They were deleting ChatGPT. They were all moving to Claude. It felt very political, and if you aren't really sure what that was about, I'm gonna tell you. But the Pentagon wanted AI companies to agree that their models could be used for any lawful purpose.

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, was already doing work for the military. It had a $200 million contract, but it had two lines that it was like, “These are hard guardrails for us. We are not gonna cross these lines. There is no mass surveillance of Americans and no fully autonomous weapons,” meaning weapons that choose a target with no human making the final call.

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty damn ethical to me. And Anthropic held to those lines. The president ordered federal agencies to stop using its tools and called them the radical left, a woke company. The Pentagon said, “Oh my gosh, this is a supply chain risk.” And this is a label that is usually saved for, like, foreign adversaries, okay?

Now, within hours, OpenAI signed a deal to put its models on the Pentagon's classified network for any lawful purpose, and people lost their sh*t. ChatGPT uninstalls in the US during this time period jumped 295% in a single day, 24 hours. And then Claude shot to number one in the App Store. Hmm. A boycott called Quit GPT says that more than a million and a half people canceled, deleted, or pledged to leave. And I'm gonna be real fair, I kinda transferred at that point too. But let's go a little deeper here because I wanna be very clear because it matters.

This deal was about the Pentagon using OpenAI's tools for its own work. What scared people was what a government could do with tools like that, right? Surveillance at a scale that no team of humans could ever pull off, and that fear is real and it's fair, okay? Sam Altman admitted the rollout looked opportunistic and sloppy, and within days, OpenAI added clear language against domestic surveillance.

Now, privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that the new wording still isn't going to stop AI-powered surveillance. And last month, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal retaliation, which, y'all, I'm in HR, no sh*t, okay? Now here's why this all belongs in an episode about fear.

That week, regular people with phones in their hands pushed one of the most powerful companies in the world to rewrite a Pentagon contract in about three days. The tools you use and pay for are votes, and I want you to be sure that you are casting those votes on purpose.

So what happens when we're not in the room, y'all? I'm gonna tell you, okay? This is what it looks like when the people building this don't think about the people it will be used against. Around the end of last December, Elon Musk's AI company, which is called xAI, which makes Grok and also owned X at the time, rolled out an image editing feature for Grok on X.

Now, people immediately started using it to digitally undress women and girls from photos that they found online. The New York Times reported that in just nine days, Grok generated and posted 4.4 million images, and at least 41% of them were sexualized images of women. Now listen, y'all, I don't have the stats on how many of those were actual adult women.

Sex trafficking, child trafficking, that's a whole thing we're not gonna get into, but I do have my concerns, okay? I do not use Grok, never touched it, never downloaded it, not an Elon fan, y'all. I don't think I had to say it, but I did. Now, our own attorney general here in North Carolina where I live, his name is Jeff Jackson, he led a bipartisan coalition of 35 attorneys general demanding that xAI stop it, okay?

He said the way this tool got used to harass women was entirely predictable. Y'all, I knew you didn't think I was gonna say that. Predictable. Any woman in that product meeting coulda told him that. Any moms coulda told him that. Anyone who has ever gotten a whistle down the street or one of those crude messages on LinkedIn telling them how cute they are could have told you that.

And when reporters reached out, xAI's automatic reply said, “Legacy media lies.” Now, y'all, this is what I mean when I say that we do not have enough women at the top thinking about this with a conscience, okay? The World Economic Forum's new Global Gender Gap Report says women were only 26% of new AI hires in the US last year, compared to half of all of the hires in non-AI roles.

Now, around the world, women only hold 13% of C-suite AI roles at AI companies. 13%, y'all. And this is the part that really just, like, ugh, made my stomach turn, made me kinda like, bleh, gag a little bit. Women make up 57% of the workers in the jobs that are most likely to be disrupted by generative AI. So we're the most exposed, and we're the least represented in the rooms that are making the decisions, and that is a sticky floor, y'all, that has a very expensive price tag on it.

So with the same report, at the rate we are going, it will take 90 years to reach equal representation in leadership. A girl who is born today may never see that in her lifetime. My daughter's eight. In 90 years, she'll be 98, and I'm just gonna, like, cross my fingers she's got good genes and longevity, but think about that.

Our own children may never see that. So okay, we gotta talk about the part that the doomers leave out of all of this, and I told you I'm a fan, and I mean it. I mean, I think that's pretty obvious by now. But here's the part the scary headlines skip. In 2024, half of the Nobel Prize in chemistry went to two scientists at Google DeepMind for an AI model that solved a problem biologists had been stuck on for 50 years: predicting the shape of proteins.

Okay, don't lose me if you're not a scientist. I'm not either. But researchers are using that work to better understand antibiotic resistance and to map enzymes that can break down plastic. And yes, one of those scientists is... Gosh, I'm gonna mess up his name, but it's Demis Hassabis, who signed that same extinction statement.

People are complicated, y'all, and so is this technology. But what I will say is, like, I really think AI is going to be something that helps us cure cancer, find the solution for Alzheimer's, okay? But here's the deal. That same Pew study found that more teens think AI will be good for them than bad for them.

So our kids are less scared than we are, and I don't want to teach them to be scared. So I'm holding both, right? That this technology can help cure diseases, and it can be used to undress a teenager in a photo. What decides which one we get is the people, right? The people who build it, the people who make up the rules, the people who are sitting in the rooms where the decisions are made.

And that's why I refuse to let fear be that whole story.

So y'all, I believe it is our responsibility to lift while we climb, and so I think that we do owe the next generation something, right? Like, what do we do about this? And I believe that we have a responsibility here as a woman, as leaders, and as parents.

So I told you I was gonna give you three moves. The first one is I need you to start using it for yourself, and I need you to let people see you use it. You cannot lead something that you refuse to touch, and you cannot protect your kids from something if you don't understand it. If the headlines have kept you away, I understand.

I get it. But I'm gonna need you to start anyways. So this week, if you have not gone down the AI rabbit hole, I want you to pick one real task, something that you already do, whether that is prepping for a meeting with a new client and you're doing deep research on the client. Maybe you're drafting a project plan.

I want you to try it with AI. And then I want you to tell one person at work how you did it. Because the women who know how to talk to the machines, those are the women who are getting invited to the table where the AI decisions get made, and that's how we change that 13%. Remember, that 13% is the number of women leaders in these big AI companies, okay?

So second move, I'm gonna need you to parent it loudly. So we've all had the stranger danger talk. We've had the internet talk. This is the next talk that you have to have with your kids, whatever age appropriate that may be, right? Like, I don't know that it's necessarily appropriate with the tinies, but you definitely wanna have this with your other kids, okay?

So I want you to sit down with your kid, and I want you to use it together, and I want you to ask it a question, and then I want you to ask your kid, like, “How would we know if this is true?” And I want you to tell them that, “Listen. Hey, a chatbot is a tool, and it also is not gonna love you back. It also is not a trusted friend. It is not an individual. You do not need to have a relationship with this machine,” okay?

You also have to address these things with your girls, right? If you have a daughter, you need to tell her what the hell happened with Grok, and in a way, of course, that fits her age so that she knows her image belongs to her, and she can always come to you if something happens, right?

I mean, these kind of like sexting things and they're going all around anyway. This is just like another level of it. But when your kid comes home saying, “AI is terrible,” I want you to pull up that seat, and I want you to say, “What would you build with it?” Like, make it fun. And then the third move is follow the money and use your voice, okay?

The midterms are coming up in November, and AI money is pouring into these races. I want you to look up where your candidate's money comes from. Okay? opensecrets.org makes it super easy. Call your state legislators because the states, whew, that is where a lot of the real protection is happening, okay? So at work, if your company has an AI council or a pilot group, I want you to get involved, okay?

If there isn't a woman on it, I want you to say, “Hey guys, this is what I've noticed. Can you tell me why there's no woman here?” And then you get your ass in that room, okay? You can start with all three of these today, so do it to it, y'all. But I would say make sure you know where your candidate's money is coming from.

I think that's probably one of the best things that you can do. And if you are sitting, whew, with all this fear and overwhelm right now, maybe you didn't even know half the sh*t that I just told you about. Number one, I'm glad you do, and number two, I know it is alarming, but I am right there with you in the messy middle.

I am still reading the headlines in the middle of the night saying, “What the hell?” And you know what? Like, maybe the fear is for your kids, maybe it's for your job, maybe it's for all of humanity, okay? I don't know, but whatever that is, I want you to explore it. I want you to get close to it because fear shrinks when you understand the thing.

And so this week I am going to practice the one thing, of course, that when I feel that headline panic, I'm gonna ask one question: Who benefits from me being scared right now? And then I'm gonna do one small thing. I'm gonna have a conversation with my kid. I'm going to call a legislator, and I'm gonna do something productive with that.

And if you wanna do this with other women, y'all, this is exactly why HER Jumpstart exists. We have a new cohort of Jumpstart starting in October. It is four Wednesdays of AI and leadership. It's October 7th. You will leave knowing how to talk to the machine, and you'll be doing it next to women who refuse to accept all this bullsh*t that I just told you about, okay?

The link is gonna be in the show notes, and if you want the whole argument for why this moment matters so damn much, it's also in my book, The AI Gap. Now, my job as a mom is to walk into the future just a few steps ahead of my kids and hold the door open for them. At least that's how I like to look at it.

My job as a leader is to make sure a lot more women are standing in that doorway with me. So y'all, I am cheering you on. I am in it with you, and I believe in the infinite possibilities of what we build when we are in the room.

If this episode resonated with you, don't let it stop here. Send it to a woman you care about, a colleague, a friend, someone who's been on your mind while you were listening. These conversations are meant to be shared, and you never know what one small shift can unlock for someone else. And if you haven't already, make sure that you're following the podcast.

Leave a rating and write a quick review. It helps more women find this space, and it keeps these conversations going. If you're ready to go deeper, come a little closer. Send me a DM. I'll invite you to sit in on a live HER Collective session as my personal guest. No pressure, no strings attached, but you get to experience it, feel the room, and see what happens when women start moving together.

Until next time, y'all, keep going, keep choosing differently, and let's smash the ceilings and close the gaps.