Afterwards, I received some lovely messages from readers across the UK, saying what I wrote chimed with them and that they wanted to know more.

A week later, I gave an in-person talk: When women were computers, which came out of me researching the history of AI and computing to put together my original talk on Demystifying AI.

During that women-talk as I call it, I realised I was talking to myself, yearning to see myself reflected in technology. I had been sitting in a circle the weekend before, exploring Fairytale Medicine and us all sharing what was important to us, speaking about ourselves. And, as I luxuriated in both lovely safe spaces, a plan came together.

So! I put together a page as the first step into creating a similar lovely safe space in which people could learn about AI, without any fuss, saying this:

I built AI before it was fashionable and shiny.

Before the headlines.
Before the hype.
Before Y2K and dot-com boom.

Today, AI can feel fast, noisy, and intimidating,
which is why I want to create a space where we can learn – together:

Slower.
Safer.
Human.

A place to ask questions without judgment,
to explore ideas without pressure,
and to be curious without the rush.

That text has gone from the page now as I keep updating the page to get it to represent those who shows up because:

It’s about everyone

Answering the call:

What do you need to know so that you talk about AI confidently?

I believe that technology is a mirror for society, so if you can’t see yourself in the mirror, then how well are you seen in society?

And, so began, a fabulous journey.

Step 1: The Questionnaire

I created a three-question questionnaire called: What would you like to know about AI?

I sent it to everyone who had reached out and kept it brief. Most people already have 10,000 things to do everyday without learning about AI or answering long detailed questions about AI. I decided that a good starting point would be three things:

Understanding AI, Using AI, and Explaining AI.

I was also in talks with the lovely team at VIA about giving an extended version of my Demystifying AI original talk and the team kindly shared my questionnaire with their community too. 

The results came quick and fast!

Step 2: The Pilot Group aka the AI Co-Creators

Using feedback from nearly 300 people, I created an outline of a course to answer everyone’s comments and questions along with their fear and hopes. Then I realised, that I needed help to make sure I explained things at the right level. So, I did a call out on my website, asking people to sign up via my newsletter.

Seven people answered the call and us AI Co-Creators began in earnest in May.

For four weeks throughout the month of May, I promised to deliver weekly 2-3, 5-8 minute videos each Friday following the outline, answering as many questions as I could from the course outline. The following Wednesday, after my AI Co-Creators had had time to explore the materials, we had an online call. They also sent me wonderful detailed emails full of insight answering the prompt:

Tell me what helped, what confused you, questions you still have.

This led to new suggestions for video topics, and things I hadn’t thought to include, which was brilliant.

Then I would go back in the following week and alongside what was in the outline, I would create more videos incorporating what I had missed in my materials, and questions which had come up.

For example, some people were worried about safety, security in terms of permissions and viruses, something I hadn’t explicitly listed or thought of so I added that in.

It was pretty intense, but absolutely wonderful. I soon found also, that I may have potentially bitten off more than I could chew. Creating videos, managing feedback, and then changing the planned videos to include materials that I hadn’t thought of, along with the admin of emails, zoom call reminders, all at once, is a lot. Apparently at home, I talked and did nothing other than AI for the full month. Though it was fabulous to be that deep in something and committed whole heartedly. I had so much energy fizzing.

Agile Teaching

Some things I learnt along the way:

Firstly, I overpromised. There was no way I could realistically explain what I wanted to say in five minutes. So, some of the videos ran longer. Secondly, in some weeks there were five videos, which was a bit off-putting.

The AI Co-Creators were great and took it all in their stride and suggested many ways to deal with that from splitting up the videos to running it longer.

Practicalities noted to ponder, from them I collected information in two ways:

1. Quantitatively via video data analytics: I could see which parts of the videos people looked at more than once and which bits people got bored and dropped.
2. Qualitatively via email: The group fed back really detailed observations – explanations that didn’t work, either because they were missing important details to not giving enough of a recap or repetition before building on concepts already defined. Then there were delivery insights from the way I displayed and used visual aids to sometimes if the audio was not exact, the lack of lip synching could be really off-putting for those who listen and lipread at the same time.

At some point I will compile a whole list of all the feedback so that I can explicitly document it as it is a great resource for designing courses aimed at the general public specifically to reduce the friction to learning something like AI.

Step 3: Refine and Adapt

Reading their feedback and suggestions, I stripped out what didn’t work, emphasized what did, added missing explanations and extra suggestions of other things they wanted to know about based on what they had learnt so far, and together we shaped the curriculum in an Agile Teaching style which was so much more rewarding than if I had done it myself.

The major revelation I found was that the AI Co-Creators needed far less technical detail than I thought. They didn’t want or need a dense academic lecture; they just needed it to make sense from start to finish, with more examples and clear hands-on instructions.

This meant adjusting the learning flow. By:

• Reducing information density per segment.
• Adding more explicit transitions and sometimes more details between ideas.
• Reinforcing key concepts over time with repetition and reintroduction before building on them.
• Simplifying terminology on its first introduction and repeating it and explaining it a few times each time I mentioned it.

All the AI tools I used were free, which meant that when it came to creating AI generated videos, I used a lot of tools – perhaps too many, but that was the only way to create something for free especially when I made a movie.

This was an odd trade-off, as too many tools can be overwhelming, but only one or two tools would have meant that I expected my AI Co-Creators to sign up and pay money, which is rather a commitment. I am still pondering this practicality. I am thinking, I can spring for a subscription and do some fancy examples to wrap up the course to show other people whether it’s worth the money. This is a change for me as I invariably behave like a student – well one from the days when education was a free, life-changing, beautiful gift, instead of some big debt around a young person’s neck.

What It Felt Like (Honestly)

Building a course this way is intense.

I was creating content, teaching it, and analysing it simultaneously in a constant feedback loop where I was always refining and thinking rather than finalizing. Most of the time it felt messy and I didn’t feel too confident and some of the time I was just exhausted, especially as we had a couple of the hottest May days ever. But, now looking back at the 16 videos and the 6-page handout, we created along with the wise feedback for course design, I am really pleased with the results. It was so much better than anything I could have done by myself and the journey was so much fun.

It felt very comradely with the AI Co-Creators. I love that the course was shaped by real learner experience, not assumptions.

Instead of asking: What should they understand? I got to see in real-time and answer: With what are they struggling? Am I giving them the right information at the right level? I focused on fixing that, mainly by explaining things better, or differently, sometimes more succinctly and other times, with less technical detail. And, sometimes they would come to my rescue and suggest something.

For example, one AI Co-Creator suggested an exact explanation between normal coding and AI coding, so I have now put that in and got to see how that was received last week in the first live session on VIA.

The difference between my should and their actual is truly where the value lies.

The First Live Iteration

As mentioned above, I am teaching the results of the May-intensive once a week on VIA. I began on Tuesday 2nd June 2026 and will continue for four sessions.

This means that I am repackaging content from the videos I created for and with the AI Co-Creators each week into hour long sessions ready to deliver on Tuesdays. This is much easier that creating materials from scratch, but it is still a bit of work, so yesterday afternoon I was grabbing stills from the videos to put into slides and thinking about timings and interactivity.

I am also collecting prompt ideas to share with everyone. Tuesday just gone someone shared a fabulous prompt idea:.

I have been putting old black and white photos into ChatGPT and asking it to colourise them.

This is the best bit for me about technology and  I’ve blogged about the phenomena of experience, which is that  people will always find unexpected enriching ways to use technology every single time. I love it!!

The VIA team have me pencilled in to run it again in August, and hopefully again before the end of the year, to catch people at different times. I am ready for them whenever they call.

The Next Chapter

My original plan for the next phase was to package it all into a static, online video course for anyone who wanted it. But during this time, I realised that I prefer live interactions in real-time. It’s lovely to see people learning by conversing, asking questions, making suggestions and we all get immediate feedback.

And after the intensity of May and the repackaging of June, it would be fun to teach it a couple of times whilst it is fresh in my head, tweaking to make it richer and clearer and adding in more examples, as I get more and more feedback.

So! Instead of hiding behind pre-recorded videos, I have decided to host and teach this course live as I test out different formats for the rest of the summer starting in July. It will be great fun to deliver these materials a few more times in different ways in one block, in four weeks or two to see what lands.

Over the next couple of weeks:

Either way this will eventually lead to an online video course, either as a complement to the live sessions, or as a bundle, or as a separate format entirely, so people who prefer learning at their own pace can Demystify AI that way.

People who like the live sessions can do those, and then at some point I would love to do in person sessions: Bring your laptop let’s learn together! I just have to figure out venues and logistics. Getting together in real life is totally the best to watch people use technology in fresh and unexpected ways.

In the meantime, there’s still time to attend the online four part Demystifying AI sessions on VIA until the end of June, and everything will be available on VIA catch-up for a while after.

And! I will be Demystifying AI over a Pint for Pints of Knowledge on Wednesday 24th June, in real life. Come for pint, leave demystified!

If you have an idea for how you would like to see Demystifying AI delivered or would like me to repackage it for your organisation, drop me a line via the contact page.

Us, the AI Co-Creators have already talked about coming back together in the Autumn to create new materials so I will announce that on the AI Co-Creators page nearer the time. I am so looking forward to it already, getting the gang back together and welcoming in new Co-Creators.

So! Come join us as part of the team, or sign up at one or all of the above, so that we can Demystify AI and co-create together.

I can’t wait to see you there!

To be fair, I’ll talk about AI anywhere but combining tech talk with a relaxed pub atmosphere is hard to beat—especially as AI continually captures the public imagination.

So! I am delighted to announce that I will be giving a talk in the pub, hosted by Pints of Knowledge:

 In this talk, we trace the recurring rise and fall of AI with its spooky stories of the ghost in the machine. From robots in Ancient Greece to present day ChatGPT, we look at how and why AI was created and exactly what it can and cannot do.

Pints of Knowledge is a great organisation set up to meet the need for people getting together and to share expertise in a friendly setting. It’s where fascinating ideas meet a relaxed pub atmosphere!

Check out their website and follow them on Instagram to find out more. Or buy tickets on ticket tailor.

I hope to see you there!

Bio

Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth’s journey into AI began in 1993, initially as an excuse to spend a summer in Paris. It led her to the Alps, where she represented Switzerland in technical innovation. Since 2001, she has worked as a university lecturer and human-centred AI consultant. Ruth firmly believes that technology is a mirror of society, and that understanding how our computers work is key to feeling more confident—and happier—in an increasingly digital world.

Ruth was featured in WI Life Magazine in February 2026 and recognised on National Women in Science and Engineering Day 2025 for her work highlighting that modern technology simply would not exist without the contributions of women, who were the original computers.

Her website and blog attract over 1.2 million visits each year.

I am thrilled to be ‘demystifying AI’ on VIA in June, Tuesday mornings at 9.30am. We begin on 2nd June. Together we will explore AI: How to understand, use and explain it.

I consider myself very lucky to have been a tutor on the VIA, WI Learning Hub, since 2024.

VIA grew out of Denman College, which was the embodiment of the mission of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (WI) to educate and inspire.

During the pandemic, Denman College shifted online, and in 2024 it became the WI Learning Hub. Early this year it went through its latest very sleek transformation to become VIA, through which the WI offers an accessible and welcoming online learning platform to everyone. You can read about it in depth on their story page.

My journey began with them in March 2024 and over the last couple of years I have given a whole range of talks from AI to digital journalism. Each time the wonderful participants have wanted to know more, especially in February this year, after I was featured in WI Life Magazine, as various WIs up and down the country reached out, wanting to know about AI and about how women were the first computers.

In response to all these lovely people, I created a short questionnaire asking people what they wanted to know about. I shared it through my newsletter and VIA shared it too theirs.

The response was amazing. Over 300 people came back to us with lots of comments and ideas.

From that, I set up the co-creator group and we have been creating and exploring materials to demystify AI to answer everyone’s curiosity and concerns. One of the results, of which, will be:

Demystifying AI: How to Understand, Use, and Explain It. A 4-part course for everyday life, starts Tuesday 2nd June at 9.30am.

Over four weeks for an hour each week on VIA, we will explore what AI is and isn’t, where it came from, how to use it, how it works, and where it all might or might not lead.

Join me Tuesdays in June, live, or on demand:

I can’t wait to see you there!

It made me realise how much confusion there is around what AI can, and cannot, actually do.

Since then, I’ve been offering light-hearted, fact-based talks that cut through the hype, grounded in my own experience working with AI since 1993.

You’ll find upcoming talk and course dates listed below, with more detail on the Talks page.

If you’d like me to speak at your organisation, or need a Demystifying AI course:

Future events

Demystifying AI: How to Understand, Use, and Explain It. A 4-part course for everyday life,
Tuesdays 2nd, 9th, 16th & 23rd June, at 9:30am, on VIA.

Demystifying AI, Wednesday 24th June 2026 at 7.30pm, Pints of Knowledge, The Blues Kitchen, Brixton.

Demystifying AI, Wednesday 9th September 2026 at 8pm, Finchley WI.

Past events

When women were computers, 9th March 2026 at 6pm on VIA.

When computers were women, 23rd February 2026 at 8pm, Maple Village WI, Surbiton.

Bacon on Ice-cream, 9th February 2026 at 6pm on VIA.

2025

Demystifying AI, 12th November 2025 at 7.30pm, WI Learning Hub.

Digital Journalism, 27th August 2025 at 7.30pm WI Learning Hub.

Demystifying AI, 20th August 2025 at 7pm, PubSci, The Old Kings Head, Borough.

AI at the movies, 9th July 2025 at 7.30pm, WI Learning Hub.

Human-computer interaction, 25th June 2025 at 7.30pm, WI Learning Hub.

Demystifying AI, 27th March 2025 at 7pm, Vox Feminarum Women’s Voices.

When women were computers, 20th March 2025 at 7pm, Vox Feminarum Women’s Voices.

Bacon on ice cream, 5^th March 2025 at 7:30pm, WI Learning Hub.

Ghosts of AI, 12th February at 6pm, The National Federation of Women’s Institutes’s Learning Hub.

2024

Digital Anthropology, 18th November at 6pm, WI Learning Hub.

When Women were Computers, 14th October at 6pm, WI Learning Hub.

The Ghosts of AI, 12th June at 7.30pm, WI Learning Hub.

2023

The Ghosts of AI, 15th March at 7.30pm, Gothic Valley Women’s Institute.

Last updated: May 2026

Little did I know but, this brief talk would become my web design series. Although the first blog, which became 0 in the reshuffle, came two years earlier as I was pulling together some ideas about web design and the science of communication as a play on words from communicating about science after a journalist had written a scientific article about how we could now print kidneys and transplants would soon be a thing of the past. What can I say? Hollywood has a lot to answer for.

Two years later, I added in structure as I was teaching web technologies. Then, I began thinking about designing my online human-computer interaction (HCI) course, I began by looking at the web design series. I wanted to combine the practical design skills of user experience (UX) with other HCI considerations such as, how technology changes society and yet fundamentally, HCI is about designing dialogue.

It sounds like I had a plan. Perhaps my subconscious did, of which I wasn’t aware.

Down the side of the page, I have written two things: Websites are becoming like apps – contextual data, personalised UX, and user behaviours. I guess I was thinking cross-platform maintenance for web apps, mobile apps, and websites, as well as breaking down large code bases into smaller maintainable units. This is a timeless idea, after the 1970s and the idea of designing massive IT systems to support whole companies (particularly the government) through Structured Systems Analysis and Design method (SSADM), when it became more apparent that designing small software applications to do small tasks was more efficient and maintainable than one big monolith. This is an idea people are revisiting now with AI agents, instead of one big know-it-all AI.

Weaving the tapestry of life and seeing structure

The other thing I wrote, I want to say in the margin, but I don’t like lines or margins so the page doesn’t have any, is the acronym HAIL: Honesty, Authenticity, Integrity and Love. I thought it was about meditation or something yogic I had read, but a quick google tells me that comes from a TED talk by Julian Treasure about how to speak so that people listen. I was very enthusiastic about TED talks at that time and Masterclass, as in another corner I have written something about James Patterson, and how he works on an outline of a novel for at least three months. Structure is important.

My most favourite Masterclass course to this day – I did a lot of them – is Will Wright’s Game design, the designer of Sims 4 amongst others and oh great joy, I even found the notes yesterday that I had scribbled during the course which I thought I had lost forever, though I distinctly remember the day itself.

It was my last couple of days of a year long subscription that I had been gifted by Masterclass, and I didn’t have long to learn everything. My eldest had just had a kidney biopsy, on a kidney that had not been printed by a machine, so I spent the whole course taking care of her, fretting about her, feeding the cats, cooking dinner, chatting to her and her sister, intertwined with snippets of Game Design, and prepping lectures.

Wright loves to study real life and complex adaptive systems, something I wrote about in my last blog – how AI is heavy with promise. I think Will Wright should study women and see in practice complexity look performatively easy as it has done since patriarchy began. When I read about Mary Somerville, the woman for whom the word scientist was invented, looking after her kids, doing mathematics, and writing letters advising Ada Lovelace to do the same, well complex and adaptive don’t begin to cover it. Something I think about a lot and was pondering last year, as I was asked to prepare a mini-lecture video on loops in programming.

Ada Lovelace and the Jaquard Loom

As chance would have it, this came shortly after I had just transcribed my: When women were computers talk, to put it in My little book of talks.

My first thought was Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer and inventor of loops, inspired as she was by the French Jacquard weaving loom, which had been invented in 1725, in the notes she wrote about Babbage’s proposed design of an Analytical Engine.

Ada has a special place in my heart as I first heard about her in my final year undergraduate computing degree when she was casually mentioned because the language ADA was named for her. I sat up straighter and was all ears. It only took a few facts of her life to make me feel excited, included and inspired by technology. I think about that moment a lot. Because, I believe that part of my role as a teacher is to present the materials in a way which intrigues and inspires students so that not only are they are excited about what I am teaching, but wish fervently to go beyond what I present so that they can see where it came from and where it could lead, and stay up all night to learn something new.

One of my most popular blogs was written in response to some students saying that databases bored them. I understood where they were coming from but, when I put the database into context with storytelling and big data, well then, they too sat up and realised the importance of organising our data because it cannot organise itself.

Ada predicts AI

And, that was my initial aim with this video. I wanted to begin with Ada’s observations, and in passing, the Jacquard Loom which had a guide made of card with holes to direct how the loom sews, which inspired those piano players in saloons in the wild west, and the input/output method for calculating machines and then computers. I would have quoted her saying: The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. And, then referred everyone to how Ada anticipated generative AI writing music:

She was a musician as well as a mathematician so it was obvious to her. Music is shaped by physics – frequency, vibration, ratios – which is described by maths. And, whether that key change happens in Mozart or Coltrane, there’s a predictable structure holding it together, quietly doing its work, which for me, is why neither one of these composers ever get old. As there’s enough surprise within the predictability of the constraints to make it feel fresh and new, even if I have heard them a million times.

Ada knew this.

And, she knew that whether you were improvising on the piano or playing the famous cadenza of Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F minor, Op. 73, oh my days, I think my parents went slightly bonkers as I practiced that over and over, these runs sound fresh and beautiful as the day they were first conceived, even as they follow a tight structure and relations. This is because, even the most expressive, improvised-sounding moments are grounded in something precise and ordered. It’s not restrictive — if anything, it’s what allows the music to make sense, to resonate, to endure. Ada was ahead of the game, she knew that it was this understanding and ability to program, is what makes AI tick. It’s what makes Will Wright get out of bed on a morning to design games to see the emergent behaviour. It is what makes technology so exciting. And, it is what makes students sit up in lectures, and for me to make pictures of Ada, like the one above with AI, to marvel at its incredible ability whilst knowing exactly and predictably how it works.

Alas! For this one mini-lecture, no one had time to hear any of that, I didn’t get the impression either that they cared, but mine is not to reason why, so, undaunted! I looked at their existing syllabus along with the recommended book about ninja coding in JavaScript (eye roll), which I flicked through and it all seemed standard enough.

Why are we still teaching while loops?

However, when the while loop was introduced, it said ninjas use break; and return;. This upset me quite a bit as my first response was no one does that, and then I thought, in fact no one uses while loops. Do they?

I did a bit of a survey around friends – the serious coder ones from my undergraduate days – who have been coding away for decades, including one mate, whom I mentioned in my first year of blogging just to check that I wasn’t just talking about myself. And, my belief was confirmed. No one uses while loops, it’s not just me. So then I was wondering why do we still teach them?

But teach them I had to, otherwise I might have looked like I didn’t know what I was talking about. But, the reason why break; and return; are terrible non-ninja coding approaches is that, we want our while loop, and its better organised relative the for loop to enter and exit logically within the same line of code. We don’t want it jumping all over the place, in the same way we don’t want self-modifying code or replicating systems. We want dependable, explicable and understandable code, well written and clear.

My end resulting mini-video of five-minutes precisely can be found below, with Ada completely dropped, only adorning the first page, complete with the punch card inspiration of the Jacquard Loom guide. Like I’m back as an undergraduate not being educated about the women who made the field of computing.

The accompanying handout can be found here: https://ruthstalkerfirth.com/wp-content/upLoads/LoopsForJavaScript.pdf

Five more minutes of context and ahhh, those students would have remembered forever what excellent logic looping looks like and all the whys and wherefores, which make a story compelling.

In the very last page of the notebook of that year, when I launched myself into blogging about web design, I have written at the bottom:

A sentiment which still echoes strongly today. And, for me that is the thread that quietly ties the strands of this blog together.

From Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace, to loops, structure, and the invisible human labour which bolsters complexity. Blogging, in its own way, is a loop for me. It has been a space to return, to iterate, to refine ideas that resisted being tidied, as I realised that I have a place in that space, in that infinite loop of learning, loving, and expressing, which fills me with so much joy.

And, the best bit! I can completely understand what I have written – literally, because my handwriting is terrible – and, because I am a connector, I join the dots, like all those women before me, in the name of making complexity look easy to humanise computers and make them better for everyone.

She was lovely and friendly, but there was something about the way she spoke that I just couldn’t put my finger on, until part way through the evening it struck me that when she talked, she sounded exactly like a computer.

When I mentioned this to the hubby at the party, he didn’t miss a beat saying:

That’s right. Logical, mathematical, very smart, and I thought, that’s the girl for me.

When I showed him the quote above the other day, to check if he minded me talking about him, he said: Hmm. But then I married you, and frowned, which made me laugh, demonstrating the reason why I married him. I don’t know why he married me, but not to worry! These days, my husband can talk to computers all the time, he can chat to ChatGPT. It is logical, mathematical and smart and the AI I most often turn to, when I want to think through my thoughts.

It has come a long way since the Chit Chat. Chitty Chitty Chit ChatGPT version that I blogged about in April 2023. Well, it has and it hasn’t in terms of AI, pure AI. Because while it appears more human-like, it hasn’t become more intelligent in any meaningful sense. It doesn’t reason any better. It doesn’t understand anymore. It just looks like it does, which is why people say the AI is improving.

The language that describes AI is heavy with promise: Deep learning, which simply refers to  the many (deep) layers of code the data is pushed through; latent spaces, which are compressed representations of patterns in the data, sound as if they contain hidden depths of meaning; and, emergent behaviour, the idea that simple rules can produce complex outcomes, and we think that perhaps something like intelligence might appear.

This is wishful thinking: Murmurations of birds move beautifully. Traffic systems self-organise. But we don’t know how. Gestalt psychology shows how the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, but that doesn’t mean we understand the organising central principle, or even if there is one.

We fill in the gaps whilst these systems, rather like generative AI, do something else which is perform intelligence.

Performative AI feels human

The other day I was asking ChatGPT about some situation in which I wanted reassurance, and once I felt reassured, I wondered whether other people ask it for reassurances too. (Basically, am I normal? Answers on a postcard, please.)

So I asked:

What are the most common questions people ask?

Reassurance, it said.

This was suspiciously convenient so I searched around the web and there are hundreds of website with titles such as the Top 10 questions of ChatGPT, the Top 100 questions asked so far, but none of them have references to back up their claims from say OpenAI.com, the only organisation who could really know, so I am guessing the authors asked ChatGPT like I did and it reflected back our conversations.

There’s something quietly revealing in that. We often talk about AI as if it’s replacing thinking. But it’s not. If anything, it’s stepping into a gap that was already there — a lack of space for thinking to unfold at all, somewhere we can go to find our thoughts reflected.

This reflection is emphased by design as certain default information is stored when we interact with ChatGPT and other generative AI, so that it seems that the AI changes to respond to the person talking to it. Though, in actual fact there are so many wrappers around the ‘raw’ AI to support ‘conversational responsibility’, from making sure that AI is not encouraging people in the wrong direction if someone is typing in desperate things to cleaning up any input that may violate its policies. These new responses have come from very targeted training, human-in-the-loop as it is known, and lots of layers/wrappers to do these checks so that it can claim to be ethical and responsible, and aligned.

I have also seen many conversations in chat groups of people claiming that they trained the AI. They haven’t at all, what really happens is that the AI rereads the conversation which has gone before, and tailors the answers, known as retrieval augmented generation, RAG for short, so that it responds appropriately. It is conversational adaptation, patterning, layers of interface that create the feeling of responsiveness. Training AI is a different thing altogether and cannot happen on the fly, the AI is frozen in time until it gets fed more data in training and often has its architecture tweaked.

Instead AI mirrors us, tracks our tone and feeds it back in a structured way which is enough to feel like understanding. But structure is not understanding, nor intelligence, it is merely a shape.

As someone who has researched, thought and taught human-computer interaction, I have spent a lot of time thinking about dialogue and designing dialogue. To have responsible design, we need our interactive systems to be transparent, so that users can trust it and trust that the answers are true. Typing that makes me sound deeply old-fashioned as generative AI is not worried about that. It is not looking for truth or understanding. It is looking for plausibility – for producing responses that look like good answers, whether or not they are, and it does this by producing the most statistically likely next word in the sentence given the context based on its training, and what has gone before in the current conversation. Theoretically, if it is trained on enough ‘truth’ data it should produce ‘truthful’ answers, but there are no guarantees.

But because it look plausible, it looks like it is thinking and intelligent, which raises the possibility that we respond to the performance of thought more readily than we do to thought itself. And, this seems to be a reflection on modern life. Real thinking can’t unfold when we are all so busy, delivering and performing, we just don’t have time to accommodate half-baked ideas. Everything we do is optimised for results. Especially in on-line spaces, we can’t just lurk, we often feel obliged to perform, something I have blogged about when thinking about social computing.

There’s no room for hesitation, for ambiguity, no one ever says: Mmm, let’s just think about that for a moment. Actually the only people who ever say that are vicars during sermons and even then, it is rhetorical. We put a pin in things, circle back, as we rush on to the end, and thinking gets compressed, performed. Or even abandoned in the rush to deliver the answer. With vicars, the answer is always: Come to Jesus, with everyone else lately, it is AI.

Scaffolded AI

On top of generating plausible answers, AI then helps with scaffolding, something which pops up a lot in psychology, education, and learning theory and is a term popularized by psychologist Lev Vygotsky, about how people learn better when guided. Most generative AI does this, it searches through user input and if it looks like the user has uncertainty or overwhelm, or is juggling lots of ideas, the AI will suggest a shape, some sort of structured approach: 

Do you want me to structure an outline? Do you want me to produce a daily routine? Do you want me to compare the two options side by side?

And then keeps suggesting ways to write it punchier, shortier, more poetic and so on.

Although this is useful, I find this approach quickly reaches exhausting diminishing returns, because it constantly suggests something new, and so by the end of an interaction, it may have generated enough words to fill a book, but much of it is repeated noise. So yesterday, when I got an email asking me if I want to trial the new WordPress ChatGPT plugin to help me, I didn’t rush to sign up. I enjoy the time and space writing a blog gives me to sort out my ideas without noise and ‘help’ and feedback. I am not sure I want to mess with that.

In the same way, I was talking to a neighbour the other day, well sort of, as this bloke kept talking over the top of me so that the conversation was like an exhausting battle. He would just start talking as if I wasn’t talking at all when in fact I was answering questions (ironically about AI). He had asked me these questions as was excited as he has been thinking about AI for a couple of weeks. Alas, then he couldn’t be bothered to listen to what I know, like I was a machine spewing out facts and he was scanning the output not finding what he wanted. He would just start articulating more of his thoughts. It was deeply unpleasant. I was hoping he would ask me:

Unfortunately, he didn’t. In the same way, I don’t want to do ten rounds with a ChatGPT plugin when blogging and forget what I came to write about and what I want to clarify.

Presence without agenda

In contrast, my husband is a thoughtful man, sometimes when we talk, he will sit and think about what we have just discussed. No butting in or adding his new thoughts. He just sits watching ideas take shape. Apparently this is known as intellectual intimacy. Though I used to think he was a bit like a robot with his CPU overloaded, until the latest AI scaffolding versions appeared. But, no and now I see that it is a beautiful thing to have your thinking received without being reframed, improved, rescued, or prematurely concluded, and if you google intellectual intimacy, you can read 10 ways to get more intellectual intimacy into your ….. because we all have to be improving ourselves all the time and intimate and gah performative.

For me thanks to the latest AI improvements, I see that my hubby, lover of computers as he is, gives me a gift with a kind of listening that lets thinking exist. We have been, for so long now, trained by social media to respond via a thousand micro-adjustments with thumbs up and smiley faces until we forget that our presence is enough. Consequently, caring online can feel noisy and synthetic, leaving silent companionship to feel clanky cold and robotic, when really it is a form of intimacy the type of which we don’t easily find online, and often we fill in the gaps ourselves.

The silence my husband gives me in conversation is really attention, and it feels important. My thinking is convoluted and easily damaged by interference in the same way that complex systems are fragile, and even small disruptions can prevent them from developing fully. My ideas flourish when met with quiet attention rather than interruption. Emergence — in thought or in AI — happens in the quiet spaces where interference is absent.

Of course, I could be wrong, and my husband is not listening at all, but least he is not putting me off with thumbs up, snappy rewrites and personality changes. Like the lines we used to have write out 100 times at school: When the group is concentrating, silence is golden, robotic silent meditative repetition is exactly what allows emergent complexity of thought and that is a true gift in a noisy world, and I for one am very grateful.

In one chapter, one of our protagonists is walking down the street rehearsing aloud how he will propose:

Please consent to becoming my wife.

To which we then hear:

Arrrrrrrrr.

From an old pirate with a peg leg who walks past doing the statutory pirate greeting.

Our character replies:

Arrrrrrr yourself!

Apparently, the proper response.

This exchange made me laugh so much and was so unexpected, especially with what had gone before, that I have chuckled about it ever since. I even tried the proper response on my neighbour this morning. Not that she greeted me with the statutory pirate greeting to begin with, or even greeted me at all. I’ve blogged before about my neighbourhood, they are nice enough, but tend not to remember me or indeed each other. They are just so busy, so stressed, so something, so not present in their lives, that they do not see or remember their neighbours, even after spending time with them. It’s odd.

In any other circumstance – with real people – this could have been awkward, but this lady doesn’t really speak normally when I say hello. She just looks at me quizzically like she’s trying to fathom whether I might be related to her or that I am about to pull a fast one. Invariably, with my inexplicable salutation and vivacious joie de vivre, she braces herself for the latter. All in all, this morning, it wasn’t any more awkward than usual even after shouting: Arrrrrrr yourself! The only difference was I laughed all the way down the street afterwards. I am laughing as I type this and will laugh again every time I read it. It reminds me a bit of when I used to go play bingo with my mam and tell her that if I won that I would shout: ‘Ere you are, as people, in the Boro, would do.

‘Ere you are, AIrrrrrrrr yourself

My mam would look really shocked: Oooh you won’t, will you? I don’t know why it bothered her so much, but I loved it when people shouted it:  ‘Ere you are. I wish for one more night with her, so we could go together even though I always moaned – I am not a bingo fan. I would tell her that if I won I would shout: Arrrrrrr yourself, to see her reaction. Not that I was ever anywhere close to shouting: ‘Ere you are. Perhaps I can try that at my neighbour tomorrow instead. It definitely sounds like a Boro greeting, my favourite being: Now then.

Thinking about Arrrrrrr yourself and The Salty Mary, led to me asking AI to make me into a pirate captain, using the picture my hubby took of me, the other week, as I was leaving to go give a talk at Maple Village. The AI did indeed transform me and the resulting picture is the one of me at the top of this blog post. It also explains why The Pirate Captain Ruth is wearing a 128GB flash thumb drive (thumbstick in ye olde English) around her neck. It has her slides on it: AIrrrrrrrrr yourself!

The one below is the original.

The pictures my husband takes of me are always a bit weird.

Don’t make me look like I have a moony face, I say, as he often makes my face look big and round. I don’t know how manages it, he must zoom in on a special moony face mode. My face was okay this time but I had other questions:

Why am I standing like that?

I don’t know. I didn’t ask you stand like that. You stood like that.

I look like I need a wee.

Well that’s not my fault.

He put it the family group chat and my eldest said: Errr, is that my top? I borrowed it to go with the belt, which I was given after a photoshoot last year (blog coming soon about that experience). The belt is brown and I really wanted to wear it but couldn’t find a top that it would go with it until I remembered hers. I had to sneak back in when I got home late that night.

My AI teeth

The AI drew me with an eye patch, so I asked it to remove the eye patch, as I wasn’t ready to have lost an eye in my pirate life. Although, I have read that some pirates wore an eye patch so that they were always ready to fight on the deck in the light, or below deck in the dark. Each eye was already primed. On the deck one was ready for daylight, below deck in the dark the other was ready for night, they could lift the eye patch and carry on swashbuckling. I like the idea of being prepared, like a pirate girl guide. Though I have neither been either, pirate nor girl guide. I probably would have ditched the eye patch on a hot day and then been scuppered when attacked.

However! No eyepatch drew attention to the teeth. In the original photo, I am not showing my teeth, so it generated some other teeth for me which look like my mother’s false teeth. Now this is quite apt as I went to the dentist first thing on Monday morning and unfortunately the dentist was late, so I had time to chat in the waiting room where I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, which I studied at ‘A’ level. I hate the dentist, it freaks me out, I think because dentistry wasn’t what it is now when I was growing up, and also because my mum had all of her teeth out when she turned 40, which was common back then. I was only eight-years-old and petrified of her for ages afterwards. I slept at my auntie’s house for a little while.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834)

The Ancient Mariner at the dentist

So, there I was, with my long grey hair – instead of the beard, though I had tweezed out a couple of chin hairs that morning. One was definitely grey, the other was balayage ‘cos I’m still with it – and glittering eye telling everyone about my mum’s teeth until my dentist arrived and rescued them. I felt really bad going on, but couldn’t stop myself. I gabble on when I am stressed! My teeth are fine, but each time I go we have a chat about whether I need to fix my jaunty teeth and whiten them up – well just the one at the front which is yellow, after I landed on it after going over the handlebars of a neighbour’s bike that was far too big for me when I was about 10-years-old. Turns out looking at this picture of me with a perfect smile has made my mind up for me. I like my jaunty teeth and won’t fix them unless they need it.

Theoretically, I could whiten the yellow one but it would need some extra special dental shenanigans and perhaps a root canal or even a veneer, so since it’s perfectly healthy as is, well not that healthy as the root has fossilised or something leaving it difficult to inject with whitener or indeed do a root canal, I am leaving well alone. The advantage is that I probably could have a bit part in a pirate adventure film, as most actors now have unnaturally dazzling big white Hollywood teeth and no wrinkles that do not fit in a costume drama. So, sign me up as I have my headshot now, though I would have to cut and paste my jaunty teeth back in. Lucky for me, AI etched in my wrinkles very deeply and weirdly plumped up my face.

Comfort food

Aw but I was so relieved to have left the dentist without treatment that I bought myself some comfort food which I have not eaten for years: Cheese savory sandwich filler, which wasn’t as nice as I remembered. It had a gloopy texture from the xantham gum in it. And cottage cheese, which is something I have never really liked but my mam did and I am missing my mam as it’s that time of year, and especially after all that teeth talk and scary dentist, I felt like shouting: I want me mam. Though to be fair, my dentist is lovely and always right and manages to get me to do the impossible. The x-ray chomp-down plastic-holder is impossible and even a child’s one does not fit in my mouth without a great struggle, which my dentist manages and then somehow persuades me to relax and clamp down on even though I am gagging and choking. She is patient and marvellous, and I want her to come live with me and coach me through my writing life, telling me to keep my eye patch on. I would be unstoppable with her saying: You can do it, Ruth, Arrrrrrrrrr.

Arrrrrrrr yourself! I would shout and then get on with it.

There is something so attractive about, well only in my imagination, the pirate lifestyle. We went to the Pirates exhibition last year at the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich and it was wonderful.

The reality of their lives aside, which were probably very grim, it was very entertaining, and ever since I have been enjoying a whole host of female-led pirating stories. The Salty Mary is great. As is Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al Sirafi which has a lot of magical and mystical elements, as well as an older protagonist. Lameece Issaq’s narration is so much fun. I have listened to it more than once and cannot wait for part two to come out.

I also loved Fable by Adrienne Young and the rest of that series which had several wonderful narrators all with captivating voices. Again, I listened to the series more than once. It too has many fantastical, delightful elements in it and, all the books contain vivid, salty fresh descriptions of life onboard a ship sailing the seven seas.

Salty Ruth

The only thing I miss living in London, apart from friendly neighbours, is the sea. I love that sea-fret rain that you only get to experience in a sea town. I love sitting on the beach and drinking a cup of tea and afterwards finding sand everywhere. Or those little stones which get into the turn ups on my jeans like they did the other week when I was in Brighton. And I love the way the salt air makes me hair curl right up into wonderful curliness and that I sleep better after inhaling the air. I don’t know if I really do but that’s what everyone says and I do believe that we believe the stories we tell ourselves, so I am loving that we are now hearing more stories about women.

As, I always say you have to see it to be it. Not that I would have necessarily chosen the life of a pirate, like I did the life of a university student, after seeing that I could on the telly, but I might have chosen to be more bolder, freer, saltier, recognising myself in the heroine’s role of my own life earlier on, regularly roaring the joyous salutation:

Arrrrrr yourself!

All the while knowing that answer or not, the joy is in the salutation and my shipmates are awaiting, I just have to keep on keeping on. AIrrrrrrrrrr!

I love this talk and have given it a few times now, but this was the first time I had given it in-person. Ultimately, I prefer in-person gatherings as the energy is very different, especially when I am the one doing the talking. I love watching people nod and nudge each other as what I have to say lands with them and resonates. But you know if online is all we have, then I sign me up as I am an eternal student.

Before the talk, I spent time with a lovely new friend whom I met over the weekend at a Fairytale Retreat in Brighton run by the magical Clare Beloved. My new mate picked me up at the station and we got to extend the magic over a pint as the whole retreat had been utter bliss. We had sat in circle all weekend whilst journeying with the stories Bone Woman (La Loba) and Baubo (the cheeky goddess who made Demeter laugh in her grief) and getting massages.

I got to have a massage from the wonderful Jim – Amor Fati Massage Therapy, and when he asked me what sort of massage I wanted, I considered belonging which is something I have blogged about in the past in A place of OKness (December, 2022). Looking at that blog today I see that I have used a picture of the doll I made during Clare’s Fairytale lockdown adventures, (December, 2020) and in a blog I wrote two weeks ago: Blog gazing (February, 2026), I talk about picking over the bones of this blog to reclaim those parts of me I felt I had forgotten.

Ultimately, I asked Jim for a massage that would ground me, as when Clare had asked us to do some art work, and I watched the amazing artists around me create wonderful things, I just drew around my feet, and created my own piece of art that way as my way in. What can I say? I am a computer scientist. That is what I say when I people ask me what I do. I also say that I give talks in AI. I was a university lecturer for many years, but now I am a public speaker.

And, when people tip their head sideways and look at me quizzically and ask me if I am afraid of AI, I say that no I am not, because I have built AI systems, I know how they work. I have a PhD in AI and in 1997, I even represented the country of Switzerland after writing some AI software. The event was in Germany and everyone congratulated me on my excellent English: Where did your learn your English? Even today the idea of a crowd of Germans travelling to Middlesbrough to improve their English speaking skills still makes me laugh out loud. You see:

I built AI before it was fashionable and shiny.

Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth

And it was after having a bit of a ding-dong with someone a couple of years ago, when I felt that I had to speak up to correct a load of nonsense about AI taking over the world, who asked me: What do you know about it, Ruth? Well a lot actually, Sharon, a lot.

It was then that I vowed to do two things:

1. Never sit in a circle run by anyone else than Clare (well that lesson took a bit longer, after I got kicked out of Alternatives).

2. To speak up and become someone people can trust, because I know what I am talking about when I talk about AI.

When I started putting together my very first talk on AI, I began at the very beginning: When was the first computer built? What was it built for? What was the original goal of AI? These are things I had never learnt as a undergraduate computer scientist or postgraduate AI student, and the more I looked the more I saw a whole different story from the one I had just assumed. I had assumed since no one bothered to tell me and because I had turned up one of eight women in a class with 90 men and over the years those numbers got smaller and smaller, that women had always been in the minority.

This simply wasn’t true.

It was women who invented the first PC, a woman who had first invented coding, six women who taught themselves to code as the first programmers and then taught everyone else, who invented flow charts and all the tools of the trade to make sure that code was executed in the right order, a woman who had created compilers so that computers spoke English, a woman who had invented software engineering, and women who had put men on the moon.

I could believe it! Why did I not know any of these stories? Why had no one told me? So, I wove them together to make a talk, to make a story, the story of women in computing.

And, this was a story I was so desperate to hear that the first time I told it, I cried.

So, there I was on Monday night on stage, giving this talk. As usual I began with a story of me in typing class, which I had chosen because in the option box there was only typing or computing and I thought that computers had nothing to do with me. But between fighting, typing, Julie Walters and my mam wanting me to better myself rather than working in a factory like her, I ultimately ended up on a different path. My mam also always said that I could cause a row in an empty house (something I have blogged about a few times), which sounded like a bad thing and that I really should keep a low profile – not easy to do when you are the only woman in the room. Older and wiser, I am now thinking it’s a compliment, it takes a lot of energy to create something of out of nothing, it is literally singing over dry bones!

Anyway, as I moved onto Philippa Gregory’s description of the Bayeaux Tapestry, more penises than women, and the first programmer Ada Lovelace who predicted AI writing music, something in me started to change. Now I don’t know if it was a combination of singing over the bones, having Baubo belly laughs at the weekend in circle, and that magical feeling of sitting and chatting with a new friend over a tasty beer by the fireside of a cosy pub, but I felt it. I felt the energy rising full of joy and magic.

I felt it standing on the stage.

And it was then that I realised.

I wasn’t just giving a talk to tell these stories, I was actually talking myself back into history, back into technology, back into belonging. Every woman who listened, and every woman I shared, every challenge they had faced, reminded me that like all the women before me and all the women who will come after me, I have always belonged and I am exactly where I am supposed to be. The words I was weaving, giving and receiving with those lovely women in the audience, were also a conversation I was having with myself. I was naming my history as part of the full history of women, and of technology, I was taking my place amongst the women who were computers.

The two takeaways of the talk are this:

1. You have to see it to be it.
2. Women connect the dots as they bring all of themselves to the job and make everything better.

Two things Ruth says all the time!

And these are two things you need to work in tech: role models and dot joiners. Currently, there are a lot of badly run IT departments is that they are headed up by people who don’t really know what they are doing and think they are running a DIY shop. I kid you not.

I attended a meeting recently with the head of IT systems for a world leading hospital and he said that he keeps a list of really cool tools and then when someone has a problem he picks one up and gives it to them. WTAF? This is not how you run an organisation which is in need of well designed integrated socio-technological systems to support people in many departments across many disciplines doing really complex things.

And whilst we can get into the politics of gender (which is the topic for another blog), women have been socialised to connect the dots, to make the unworkable workable and to support everyone. And, I say that because I have seen it in real life, I have seen it in the literature, and I give talks about it. The world is in a sorry state right now which is reflected in our terrible technology, as another on of my things that I say is:

Technology is a mirror for society.

also on Ruth’s bingo card of common sayings.

and so to make a better world, we need more women at the technology table so that we can make appropriate decisions on the use of our technology which is currently causing more problems than it solves and AI is just the cherry on the top.

Monday night was a wonderful experience, from the women I met, the talk that I gave, to the way that I felt as I stepped into my digital legacy, and I wish to continue down that path, but I don’t want to do it alone.

I want to design a course for women, but it is not really about gender, it’s about sitting in those warm safe spaces with people who see you, feel you, hear you and could even be you. It’s about the emotional resonance of hearing and being heard, and learning something new without aggression and without the fear of looking foolish. It’s about sharing, connecting and working together to reach a new understanding and to feel better for having spent time together. It’s how I feel in circle with Clare, in the pub with my new friend, and on the stage at Maple Village WI.

The online learning hub Via have said yes to me doing a course on AI but I will also take it elsewhere too, rather like the talks I give, I can create a space, a retreat, if there is a call. If you want me, I am here for you.

And just to show you how not magic, not going to take over the world, and how very much it is just a tool in business AI is, let us consider Google this week. They were complaining about the intellectual property theft of the exact weights on their neural nets – in other words – their algorithmic settings. Hilarious! Google the world biggest data collector, and devourer of all sorts of intellectual property, is complaining about people doing that to them. Watch the six minute video here: Is Google allowed to be mad about this?

If AI really was the self-modifying, self-replicating sci-fi version people – who don’t know anything but still give talks – tell you it is, well then, Google would not be worried about people stealing their secret sauce, would they? AI is not a force beyond our control, it is just a tool, that we created. We really have to stop thinking about it like we do the weather.

So:

Three Questions: What do you need? What do you want to know? How would you like to learn it?

I want to understand what would be truly useful for people. Left to my own devices, I might think everyone needs to code up all their own neural nets with weights so Google can keep their own, but I might be wrong. So far I am thinking non-code and really: What do you need? To this end I have created a questionnaire of three questions.

So if you think you may want to learn about AI and technology with me, let me know what it is you want to know and how you want to learn it. Your voice will directly shape what I create. Your ideas matter.

I’m thinking that at the end of my course I would like people to say:

• I know what AI can and cannot do.
• I can explain it clearly to others.
• I can use it to create.

All from grounded understanding so that they know enough to know that they totally belong at the technology table, so that they can speak up and add their voice to the discussion about how to use AI for good.

If that resonates, sign up to my newsletter so we can co-create an AI course for you to keep —and have a great deal of fun doing it.

The 50 women present were wonderful and welcoming and had a lot of really good questions which I will feed into future talks.

Afterwards they asked me if I could send some more information about the books and films I had referenced in the talk which is a really great idea and something that hadn’t occurred to me until they suggested it.

So! Today I created a small handout which I sent to them. I wasn’t sure how much was too much or not enough but went with four lovely resources which contain videos, links to books and films that I mention during the talk. Research shows that storytelling is the most powerful tool we have, and the better the story, the more it resonates, and the more we remember it. I know I want to be entertained when I am learning something so I picked the ones with links that would tell the stories in the most interesting ways.

I am putting the handout up online so anyone can access it. Sign up to my newsletter, complete my three-questions questionnaires on AI and as a thank you will receive a copy of When computers were women. And after reading, if there is something else that you would love to read about that’s in the talk, please give me feedback via my contact form, and I can adjust it accordingly.

After the talk was over, I was asked a lot of questions about AI and society, and so now I wish to create a course about AI. Read about my motivations to do so in: The talk I didn’t know I needed to hear which came directly from this lovely evening at Maple Village.

In a nutshell, I wish to create an experience that is calm and inclusive so that by the end of it, people will know:

1. what AI can and cannot do;

2. how to explain it clearly to others;

3. know how to use it to create;

and have had lots of fun along the way.

As the evening wrapped up they gave me some lovely jam, no Jerusalem they joked and organised me a lift to the station – I had been met by a friend earlier who had taken me to the pub over the road, so I had no idea where I was at all.

I find that time spent with other women is very powerful and whilst this talk may seem to be about the past, it really is an invitation to the future, one in which women must play a key role, because I firmly believe that this is the only way we will create a fairer society for everyone.

I forgot to get a picture of me in action, so here is one of the beautiful jam. I am very excited about apple pie jam on toast so watch this space for more news. I am no longer on Instagram so cannot post a picture there and today is the first time I thought aw!

FOMO? I’ve got you..

You can hear me give this talk online in two weeks time: When women were computers, 9th March 2026 at 6pm on VIA.

And, if you are interested in me giving a talk to your organisation check out my talks page for topics and ways to reach me.

The trailer

Back in early November, I got an email from the editor of WI Life magazine, asking if I would be willing to be interviewed for a column about the WI Learning Hub, as one of its popular tutors, demystifying AI since 2023. The hub is currently undergoing a rebrand to reflect that it welcomes in all of society. And, VIA goes live on Monday 9th February.

Delighted, I replied and started thinking about which photo to use (my usual) and what I would say. I did this last year for National Women in Science and Engineering Day when asked by the NFWI to share my experiences, thoughts on gender parity and how to encourage more women and girls into STEM fields. We did everything via email and they created some lovely visuals for their social media campaign which I wrote about here: National Women in Science and Engineering Day #MoveTheDial #WISEDay25.

Anyone who knows me knows that it takes me a minute, or indeed a few thousand words to get to my opinion. So, before I emailed the NFWI opinions, I wrote a blog: Women in STEM, women in society, which pulls together a whole raft of research I did: Women: Society, Storytelling, Technology in 2017, and also my own experiences of Fighting, typing and computing, which I wrote in 2024, as I prepped my most popular talk (now complete with video trailer: When women were computers) to find out what I wanted to say. Then I sent them a brief summary. This is my process and it works for me.

Excited by the editor’s email I started thinking about what it means to me to be on VIA demystifying AI. In a nutshell, I think that AI has been touted as the answer to everything when in reality, it takes a lot of code, people, data and electricity and it is highly designed. It does not update itself or modify itself, nor can you train it as an end user. Indeed, AI doesn’t really work as well as the stories would have us believe.

In my talks, I break down exactly how it works and where the stories come from. And, I absolutely love it: AI, it’s achievements and limitations, all whilst keeping it real.

Out of the spam into the feature

A couple of days later, the editor resent the email and I thought: Nooo, I have ended up in her spam. So I rang her up to tell her that I would be delighted as I give talks demystifying AI and I believe that more women should be at the table, because it is women who make software appropriate for society because we bring all of our life experiences. The editor said: Well hold the phone, this is not a column, this a feature. She didn’t really say that as she is very professional but that was the gist.

A couple of weeks later, I spent an afternoon talking to journalist Rin Hamburg and a morning in the British Library with photographer Kiki Streitberger. I had such a great time with both of these lovely women who tried to capture me, my voice, and my personality and shape it into 1500 words and two pictures. That is no easy feat. Especially as Rin said that she would be writing as me. AS ME.

Now as me, someone who has spent nigh on 20 years writing my opinions here, the idea that someone would write as if they were me, made me a bit faint at first and then, very curious as to why I would mind that. I think it comes down to the fact that I have always felt unheard as a woman in society. However, Rin worked really hard to make sure that I felt that she was representing me.

Kiki too spent ages putting me at ease as it turns out I am not comfortable being in the spotlight with a camera trained in my face. Who knew? But she made it so much fun as she took a lot of pictures and kindly sent me them afterwards so I can use them on my website. This is one of my faves: Me and Dr Alan Turing, who despite his genius and contributions to the inception of the field of computing which hastened the end of WWII by two years, was horrifically punished by society for not fitting into the social norms.

We never learn and are currently repeating history, from both the AI perspective, thinking it will solve our problems, to punishing people who do not fit into society’s neat little boxes.

– Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth

However, from a feminist point of view, Turing was a man of his time and for me the irony of the Turing Test is that it replaces the woman with a computer, saying if someone couldn’t tell the difference between the answer a human gave from a computer then we could conclude that machines think. He borrowed the idea from the BBC Radio program 20 questions which was when someone would try to guess if someone was a man or a woman by asking 20 questions. He did this at a time when women were actually called computers. They did all the grunt work for very little money and no recognition. And, his design of the computer, from which came Von Neumann architecture contained in all our computers, is straight from Turing reading Ada Lovelace’s design notes which he found in the public domain. Women, as always, do the heavy lifting and get written out of history whilst all the men get the legitimacy and the glory.  I am glad to get up his nose whilst telling the stories of how women were fundamental to the field of technology as loudly as I can.

Ruth Stalker-Inspiring

After a big wait, the magazine came through my letterbox and I was pleased and flattered to read it. The head of the NFWI gave me a lovely puff on the first page drawing attention to the feature about me as an Inspiring Woman:

Tech guru and AI expert, Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth gives WI Life a fascinating interview on the march of AI and why we should be excited and wary in equal measure. She also argues for more women at the top table in technology or it won’t be built for us. Amen to that.
– Jeryl Stone, NFWI Head

I had a couple of friends say me that they recognised me in the article which is great and I have had some lovely messages from readers across the UK, in particular saying what I wrote chimed with them. On top of which, as women always do, they raised important points about women in society and women in STEM who have many other factors which make them who they are and have a massive impact on their lives, for example, disability, accent, colour, sexuality, gender identity to say nothing of the triple shift which a lot of women are on. All these factors remain unrepresented in the data and have been ignored and often punished throughout history for simply existing. They are examples I will use in futures talks. I also got some great stories from those who have had careers as programmers and just like me began as typists. The article struck a chord and reassured me that what I say resonates.

You can read the whole article here: WI Life magazine Ruth Stalker-Firth.pdf.

And here’s the gist:

Women make up 51% of the population, it is time we had equal say in how our software is designed. For when you create software, you change the way people work, and when you change the way people work, you change society, and that is a political act. We cannot claim that society is diverse and inclusive if our data is missing 51% of the population that includes people of colour, people living with chronic illness, people in wheelchairs, people who did not fit into one binary representation, to name but a few of those who are not represented. It is easier to be it when we see, when we are represented, when we see ourselves in society.

– Dr Ruth Stalker-Firth, WI Life Magazine, Issue 153, February 2026

From interview to ink, and finally film

And finally, for fun, I fed the whole interview into AI (Google’s Notepad LM) to make a 6-minute video, because I can. Not because it’s particularly useful or that it brings anything insightful. Nor did it speed up any thinking or brought any new insight to the table. I did it simply because it was there. And, for me that currently sums up society’s use of AI.

The video is called: Why AI needs a woman’s touch. Of course it is the title, because AI says crappy things like that all the time trained as it is to believe that women are there to keep things tidy, add finishing touches and make the effing dinner whilst flittering about making everyone feel better. Oh my days!

I don’t think I will ever get bored of writing and talking about AI. I started writing here 20 years ago and I’ve been thinking about and programming AI since 1993, and even represented the country of Switzerland for technological innovation with some AI software a colleague and I wrote.

If you would like me to come to your organisation to demystify AI or tell you about when computers were women, let me know via my contact page. I would be delighted.

If you wish to dive deeper into and join a community to create a lovely space in which we can explore and learn about AI, then my AI page is for you. I look forward to working with you and can’t wait for us to get started.