Prompt Response — AI Podcast

Olivia Smith and Dave Briggs
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Technology
  • Updated Weekly

Making AI make sense. Overwhelmed by AI? We got you. The good, the bad & what actually matters. Follow on socials: @PromptResponsePodcast

  1. Sep 30

    Your AI Has a Water Bill

    Every chatbot answer runs on servers that need cooling, and a lot of that cooling uses water. UC Riverside engineering professor Shaolei Ren is the researcher who first put a number on AI's water footprint. He joins us to explain where that water goes and who ends up paying for it.

  2. Sep 15

    Your Face Is Not Yours. Perry Carpenter on Deepfakes and Why We Fall for Them

    Earlier this year, Perry Carpenter took a TV anchor's own Instagram videos and turned him into a deepfake pitching a meme coin. It took minutes. The software is cheap and easy to access. Perry is the Chief Deception Strategist at cybersecurity company KnowBe4. He's spent years studying how con artists hijack attention, and he wrote the book on it: FAIK: A Practical Guide to Living in a World of Deepfakes, Disinformation, and AI-Generated Deceptions. We sat down with Perry to find out why our brains fall for it, who's making money off it, and what actually protects your parents and grandparents.

  3. Sep 10

    AI Insiders Say It Could Kill Us. A Computer Scientist Responds.

    This week, a researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, the company behind Claude, and said publicly that the leading AI labs are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Anthropic's own alignment lead backed him up, putting the odds that AI kills all humans at greater than 10 percent within the decade. So we called someone who can open the hood. John MacCormick is a professor of computer science at Dickinson College and author of Thinking AI: How Artificial Intelligence Emulates Human Understanding. He spent years inside the research labs at Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard before turning to teaching. His book is more optimistic than this week's headlines. We asked him why. No hype. No doom. Just a very good teacher explaining what's actually happening inside the machine.

  4. Aug 28

    Data Centers Are Coming. Should You Fight Them Or Cash In? (with Professor Michael Webber)

    A Kentucky family turned down $26 million rather than let their 200-year-old farm become an AI data center. Texas Governor Greg Abbott says data center companies "dug their own grave." And Bill Gates, the ultimate tech optimist, now says he wishes AI would slow down. What is AI actually costing us? Energy expert Professor Michael Webber (UT Austin, former Chief Science and Technology Officer at global energy giant ENGIE, author of Power Trip) breaks down what AI is really doing to your power bill, why tech companies are betting on nuclear and what restarting Three Mile Island means. Plus: billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller admits AI wrote his Wall Street Journal op-ed, and asks why that should bother anyone.

  5. Aug 19

    AI Anchors, an All-AI TV Channel and the Slop Cleanup

    An AI startup spent about $50,000 to run a one-day, 24-hour news experiment on X with AI anchors reading Reuters stories, and it misidentified a woman in a Reuters clip as President Trump. Meanwhile, a real channel of AI-generated shows and AI-generated ads quietly launched on Roku and runs around the clock. And The New York Times reports the tech giants that built these tools are now racing to clean up the slop: Spotify removed 75 million tracks, LinkedIn built a report button, TikTok and Pinterest added dials to turn AI content down. We ask the obvious question: who is this for? And what happens to trust when you can't tell whether a camera, or a person, was ever there. Tool of the Week: Claude connectors. Claude can plug into other apps and tools and do the work from one chat, including a viral workflow that turns a line drawn on a map into drone-style video. Making AI make sense, one conversation at a time.

  6. Aug 11

    He Has 10,000 Customers and Zero Employees. Zuckerberg Says That's the Future.

    A company with 10,000 paying customers, on track for $10 million this year, and zero employees. The Wall Street Journal says solo founders like this are multiplying, and this week Mark Zuckerberg published Meta's vision for the AI future predicting exactly that: smaller companies, more of them. In this episode: how college students are actually using AI (and the rules they're begging for), the rise of the one-person company, the Michigan town suing an AI data center over noise that never stops, plus what Meta's "personal superintelligence" pitch means for regular people.

  7. Aug 5

    Your AI Chats Are on Google? Plus: A Memoir Starring AI Before ChatGPT Existed

    Hit "share" on an AI chat lately? Hundreds of those conversations just turned up on Google, including private resumes and work projects. Olivia and Dave break down what happened and how to protect yourself, plus LinkedIn's new "AI slop" report button and Mark Zuckerberg's rare media blitz arguing the AI industry is too gloomy. Then: poet and playwright Hannah Silva on writing her acclaimed memoir My Child, the Algorithm with an AI before ChatGPT existed, and what a machine taught her about love, motherhood and being human.

  8. Jul 23

    AI Love Bans, Data Center Millionaires and a Poet's Viral Warning (with Joseph Fasano)

    This week, poet Joseph Fasano joins us to read the poem the internet keeps passing around: "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper." We talk about what students are really reaching for when they reach for a shortcut, and what poetry can do that a chatbot never can. Plus: China cracks down on AI "boyfriends" and "girlfriends," and the real reason is the birthrate. The data center boom is minting millionaires in rural Pennsylvania while spiking water bills next door. And Anthropic bets its new ad campaign on your doubts about AI. As always: no hype, no doom, just AI explained for real people. Guest: Joseph Fasano, poet, novelist and songwriter. Find his poem at poets.org and his books wherever books are sold.

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About

Making AI make sense. Overwhelmed by AI? We got you. The good, the bad & what actually matters. Follow on socials: @PromptResponsePodcast

Information

  • Creator
    Olivia Smith and Dave Briggs
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Olivia Smith and Dave Briggs
  • Show Website
    Prompt Response — AI Podcast