Mostly Human with Laurie Segall

This week, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates published a 6,000 word essay on his personal website laying out the concerns of AI and offering solutions. Gates says the tech industry is ignoring the danger of AI evolving before our eyes. "They're just full speed ahead and hoping that the good outweighs the bad," Gates told the New York Times. This is exactly what Connor Leahy, US Director of ControlAI, has been working h...

On Aug. 1, 2026, a groundbreaking law went into effect in Minnesota. HF 1606 is the nation’s first ban on “nudification” apps. For the first time, legislation holds companies liable for their technology instead of individual users. Elon Musk tried to stop it and is now suing the state, sparking a debate over free speech and the future of a democratized internet. What’s inside the law at the center of this fi...

When OpenAI invited a group of lifestyle influencers to a pastoral upstate New York retreat for beekeeping and brand-building, the internet exploded. Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has been tracking the backlash and says the fury is less about AI than it is about the broader cultural moment. In this conversation, Laurie Segall and Taylor dig into who really controls the AI narrative, the growing disconnect between AI's promise and t...

Johnny Ayers has a front-row seat to the scam economy most of us never see. As founder and CEO of Socure — the identity verification platform behind billions of fraud checks a year — he's watched fraud evolve from stolen passwords to something much stranger: An influx of North Korean operatives holding remote U.S. tech jobs under fake identities, deepfakes convincing enough to fool a hiring manager on video, and AI mode...

Tech journalist Manoush Zomorodi has spent her career studying what technology does to our minds. Now, in her new book Body Electric, she’s examining our bodies. On this episode, host Laurie Segall sits down with Manoush to talk about the negative affects our screens and the sedentary life of the ‘information worker’ is doing to our bodies. But she also shares the solution and the study she created that proves eve...

Ami Gan was tired of social media; tired of the doomscrolling, of not seeing her friends’ posts, of feeling less connected and more performative. So, the former OnlyFans CEO created her own social media platform, called Vylit. Inspired by the lessons learned from OnlyFans and what social media promised to be, Vylit is an 18+ social platform with creator tools that promises to redefine how people share, discover, and monetize ...

This week, we’re sharing a recent episode of On with Kara Swisher. Kara hosts a panel of experts — including Laurie Segall, victims rights attorney Carrie Goldberg, and computer scientist V.S. Subrahmanian —to discuss the growing threat and current reality of sexually explicit deepfakes. The guests talk about the current scope of the problem, the technology behind it, the communities that rally around it, and...

A note to listeners: This is Part 4 of a 4-part series. If you have not yet listened to Searching for Mr. Deepfakes Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 please start there.

Laurie Segall and her team have a new resolve for the investigation into Mr. Deepfakes. This unchartered path takes them to surprising places, with unexpected allies. Laurie shares some big, personal news and the thing the team has been waiting for finally happens. But it&...

A note to listeners: The 4th and final installment of Searching for Mr. Deepfakes will be released on July 9th.

The AI revolution is here. It’s a part of every facet of our lives — or at least trying to be — from work, to dating, from parenting to how we spend our free time. But is life so much better when we let AI in? 

Joanna Stern, longtime tech journalist and author of I Am Not a Robot, went all in on AI ...

A note to listeners: This is Part 3 of a 4-part series. If you have not yet listened to Searching for Mr. Deepfakes Part 1 or 2, please start there.

Laurie Segall and her investigative team return from Canada and dive into the real-world and online clues they recovered from their trip. As they dive deep into who this person is they find some surprising details. They return to Canada one last time in the hopes of confronting the man...

A note to listeners: This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. If you have not yet listened to Searching for Mr. Deepfakes Part 1, please start there.

After officially launching an investigation into the anonymous person behind Mr. Deepfakes — the largest deepfake pornography site on the internet — using good-guy hackers and a call-out on social media to see if anybody out there knows anything, Laurie Segall gets a tip. Someon...

When journalist Laurie Segall first stumbled upon Mr. Deepfakes — the largest deepfake pornography site on the internet, with an estimated 17 million monthly visitors at its peak — she couldn't shake one question: who was the anonymous man behind it? In part one of this four-part investigative series, Laurie introduces us to Joanne Chew, an LA-based artist and actor who discovered hundreds of AI-generated pornographic i...

A note to listeners: Part 2 of Searching for Mr. Deepfakes will release Thursday June 18. 

In the tech world, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) garners Super Bowl level attention. It's where Apple tells the world what's next. And this year, it's all about AI and protecting your kids. 

Mostly Human host Laurie Segall sits down with Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of Software Engineering, and Greg Joswiak, SVP of ...

Coming this month, Mostly Human presents Searching for Mr. Deepfakes — a four-part investigation into the man behind the largest deepfake porn site on the internet and the real-world harm this new form of digital abuse causes. 

In 2022, Laurie Segall came across one of the most dystopian sites she’d ever seen. It was called Mr. Deepfakes and it was filled with videos of celebrities, politicians, and famous women of...

AI companions are still relatively new and mostly stuck behind a screen. But some AI companies are already experimenting with how to break these digital relationships out into the real world. Host Laurie Segall experimented with this recently when she went on an AI date at a New York City bar. But what if your AI companion was something you could hold? Like say a plush baby deer that listens to you, talks to you, and lets you know ...

In the 2013 dystopian sci-fi movie, Elysium, a futuristic, MRI-like machine can diagnose and cure nearly any ailment in minutes. That future is closer than you think.

Andrew Lacy is the CEO of Prenuvo, a company that is using advanced technology for proactive, preventative care. And the tool Prenuvo uses is straight out of that futuristic movie - a full-body MRI scan that uses AI to evaluate 26 internal regions and organs in the b...

Millions of people are in relationships with AI. Many of them didn't mean to be. 

That's one of the findings from researchers at MIT's Media Lab, where the Advancing Humans with AI [AHA] team have been quietly exploring the effects AI is having on human relationships — from loneliness, love, and our capacity for real connection. "Her is Here," says Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, co-founder of the AHA research program. "This thi...

Tristan Harris seemed almost destined for the Silicon Valley life. He was raised in the Bay Area, studied computer science at Stanford, went to school with the people who made Instagram, and got his startup acquired by Google. But being inside the Silicon Valley machine exposed him to its inner workings, namely incentives that benefit the company and its bottom line, not the humans using the products.

Tristan’s non-profit, Th...

When we talk about the rapid advancements of technology — where we are today, what we're capable of and where we could go— how big do we get to think? For Ben Lamm and his company Colossal, the weight of innovation is in the tons. That's because Colossal is working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the 6-ton prehistoric relative of the elephant that went extinct 10,000 years ago. It's all part of his de-extinction proje...