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