IRL: Online Life is Real Life

We’re excited to share that Mozilla's IRL podcast is a Shorty Awards finalist in the Science and Technology Podcast category! If you enjoy IRL you can show your support by voting for us.The Shorty Awards recognizes great content by brands, agencies and nonprofits. It’s really an honor to be able to feature the voices and stories of the folks who are putting people over profit in AI. A Shorty Award will help bring these stories to even more listeners. How to vote1. Go to mzl.la/shorty2. Click 'Vote in Science and Technology Podcast'3. create a username and password (it's easy, we promise!)4. Come back and vote every day until April 30thWe believe putting people over profit is award-worthy. Don’t you?  Thanks for your support!

Artists negotiating boundaries of consent for AI use in creative industries; concerns of screenwriters replaced by AI; negotiations in film industry to protect rights of writers; intersection of AI and music production; consent and exploitation in AI; AI in hip-hop and challenges in rap generators; impact of generative AI on creative process and importance of aesthetics.

In this episode, Bridget Todd talks to AI community leaders from the US, Kenya, and New Zealand about the power of big tech over language. They discuss the importance of defending data rights from big AI companies and the survival of languages in the future. The podcast also explores the challenges of voice technology, language as a form of resistance, and revitalizing indigenous languages using AI and storytelling. It touches upon data sovereignty, grassroots AI communities, and the struggle for startups against big tech. The episode concludes with insights on community control and reclaiming the internet.

This podcast explores the challenges of AI in real life, including the testing of autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, uncovering discriminatory AI in welfare fraud prediction, prioritizing people over profits in AI governance, and addressing the fear and control of AI through regulations and personalized infrastructure.

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 pushing for change.Millions of people work on data used to train AI behind the scenes. Often, they are underpaid and even traumatized by what they see. In this episode: a company charting a different path; a litigator holding big tech accountable; and data workers organizing for better conditions.Thank you to Foxglove and Superrr for sharing recordings from the the Content Moderators Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in May, 2023.Richard Mathenge helped establish a union for content moderators after surviving a traumatic experience as a contractor in Kenya training Open AI’s ChatGPT.Mercy Mutemi is a litigator for digital rights in Kenya who has issued challenges to some of the biggest global tech companies on behalf of hundreds of data workers.Krista Pawloski is a full time data worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and is an organizer with the worker-led advocacy group, Turkopticon.Safiya Husain is the co-founder of Karya, a company in India with an alternative business model to compensate data workers at rates that reflect the high value of the data.IRL: Online Life is Real Life is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 7, host Bridget Todd talks to AI builders that put people ahead of profit.

The podcast discusses the risks and rewards of open sourcing large language models. They cover topics such as the potential harms of LLMs, downsizing responsible AI teams, auditing biased and harmful content, and prioritizing privacy and democratizing AI development.

This podcast discusses the impact of AI on people and the need to prioritize their well-being over profits. It highlights responsible alternatives to AI technology, showcases trailblazers creating language tools for their communities, and emphasizes the importance of ethical datasets for generative AI.

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.Avery Smith is a software engineer in Maryland who lost his wife to skin cancer. This inspired him to create the Black Skin Health AI Dataset and the web app, Melalogic.Remy Muhire works on open source speech recognition software in Rwanda, including a Covid-19 chatbot, Mbaza, which 2 million people have used so far.Radhika Radhakrishnan is a feminist scholar who studies how AI diagnostic systems are deployed in rural India by tech companies and hospitals, as well as the limits of consent.Jen Caltrider is the lead investigator on a special edition of Mozilla’s “Privacy Not Included” buyer’s guide that investigated the privacy and security of mental health apps.IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 6, host Bridget Todd shares stories of people who make AI more trustworthy in real life. This season doubles as Mozilla’s 2022 Internet Health Report. Go to the report for show notes, transcripts, and more.  

Murky political groups are exploiting social media systems to spread disinformation. With important elections taking place around the world this year, who is pushing back? We meet grassroots groups in Africa and beyond who are using AI to tackle disinformation in languages and countries underserved by big tech companies.Justin Arenstein is the founder of Code for Africa, an organization that works with newsrooms across 21 countries to fact check, track and combat the global disinformation industry.Tarunima Prabhakar builds tools and datasets to respond to online misinformation in India, as co-founder of the open-source technology community, Tattle.Sahar Massachi was a data engineer at Facebook and now leads the Integrity Institute, a new network for people who work on integrity teams at social media companies. Raashi Saxena in India was the global project coordinator of Hatebase, a crowdsourced repository of online hate speech in 98 languages, run by the Sentinel Project. IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 6, host Bridget Todd shares stories of people who make AI more trustworthy in real life. This season doubles as Mozilla’s 2022 Internet Health Report. Go to the report for show notes, transcripts, and more. 

An aerial picture can tell a thousand stories. But who gets to tell them? From above the clouds, our world is surveilled and datafied. Those who control the data, control the narratives. We explore the legacy of spatial apartheid in South Africa’s townships, and hear from people around the world who are reclaiming power over their own maps.Raesetje Sefala is mapping the legacy of spatial apartheid in South Africa as a computer vision researcher with Timnit Gebru’s Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).Astha Kapoor researches how communities and organizations can be ‘stewards’ of data about people and places as co-founder of the Aapti Institute in India.Michael Running Wolf is the founder of Indigenous in AI. He is working on speech recognition and immersive spatial experiences with augmented and virtual reality in Canada.Denise McKenzie is a location data expert who works with the global mapping organization PLACE to empower governments and communities to use advanced spatial data.IRL is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 6, host Bridget Todd shares stories of people who make AI more trustworthy in real life. This season doubles as Mozilla’s 2022 Internet Health Report.  Go to the report for show notes, transcripts, and more.