What it's like to be undressed by Grok without your consent

Note: This episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Sharing a photo of yourself online has always carried some risk. But things got a lot scarier this year when users began using Grok, X's generative AI chatbot to create sexualized deepfakes of women and children. Iona Fyfe, Scottish folk singer and activist, was one of the people who had an image altered and manipulated by Grok. Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson talk to her about her experience. **** Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:18Speaker 01

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• 1:16Amory Sivertson?

  Heads up, this episode describes sexual situations that are non-consensual. Here's the show.

• 1:23Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Meet Aiona. See if you can guess where she's from.

• 1:50Speaker 05

  I'm Aiona Fife. I am in Glasgow, Scotland, and I am a Scottish folk singer and activist.

• 1:57Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, she told you. But it would have been kind of obvious, right?

• 2:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're a high come a diddle come a dandy-o, right?

• 2:05Amory Sivertson?

  What you may be asking? Just listen.

• 2:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Iona is well known in part for performing a certain kind of Scottish folk music.

• 2:26Speaker 05

  It's a great genre and I guess I define it by, you know, big T traditional ballads that have place names and they originate where I'm from and they hark back to the battles that happened there. And it's certainly to me about a sense of place.

• 2:50Amory Sivertson?

  And also maybe a sense of purpose. Iona mentioned she was an activist, which goes back to her musical roots and her teenage roots.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  I've been a member of my trade union, the Musicians' Union, since I was 16 years old.

• 3:04Amory Sivertson?

  That was more than a decade ago, but she's still putting activism and music together.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  I've been doing a lot of kind of work around raising raising the issue of sexual harassment in the music industry, kind of whistleblowing on that. There was a big report that came out on how widespread and systemic the issues are around sexual harassment and assault in the trad folk scene in Scotland. Eighty-one, eighty-one percent of women said that they they had been assaulted or harassed. That's a huge amount for like such a small colloquial and what we think is very couthie and enjoyable scene.

• 3:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, we should admit here, there was a bit of a language barrier at points talking to Iona.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  Couthie, it's a great Scots word.

• 3:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  What's couthie?

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Um, okay, let's, let's get the definition up. So the dictionary of the Scots language, couthie, spelt C-O-U-T-H-I-E, of persons or personal qualities, agreeable, sociable, friendly, sympathetic, pleasant.

• 4:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  We were struck by how lightning fast she pulled up the definition of couthie.

• 4:13Amory Sivertson?

  And maybe we shouldn't have been surprised. She is extremely online.

• 4:18Speaker 05

  Too much, way too much, like horrifically too much. I think I'm on all of them. I'm on Blue Sky, I'm on Mastodon, I'm on Threads, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  And of course, still X. I feel like,

• 4:36Speaker 05

  you know, when you do a gig and someone's like, "Oh, I wish I knew about this", like, the day after it happened. I'm like, "How did you miss it?"

• 4:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  What musicians among us don't know this feeling?

• 4:47Amory Sivertson?

  Indeed. And Iona's a big deal. A big deal who still has to beg people on Blue Sky, Mastodon, Threads, TikTok, Instagram, and X to come out to the show, man.

• 4:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  So she's online a lot, reminding people about her shows and just keeping her finger on the pulse.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  I do a lot of social listening,

• 5:09Speaker 05

  which is maybe a bit depressive, but like, friends will sometimes see if there's like a stushy online and be like, "Oh, sorry, you're going through it today."

• 5:17Amory Sivertson?

  Did you say a stushy?

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, another Scott, sorry. Like a kind of-

• 5:22Amory Sivertson?

  Like a troll?

• 5:23Speaker 05

  No, no, stushy, like, uh, if something was a stushy, it'd be like a ferrore.

• 5:29Amory Sivertson?

  I don't know what that is either.

• 5:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Keep going, keep going, Iona, keep going.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Oh, no, ferrore, um, an outbreak of public anger or excitement. Like a, hold on, stushy.

• 5:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love this. We're learning lots of words today. I'm in.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  A commotion, a rumpus, a row, or a state of excitement, anxiety, a tizzy. A tizzy?

• 5:52Amory Sivertson?

  A tizzy. I'm familiar with a tizzy.

• 5:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love, I also love a rumpus, personally. I'm a big fan of a rumpus, so I'm in.

• 6:06Amory Sivertson?

  Stushy, tizzy, rumpus, whatever it is, Iona's used to seeing these things because she's paying attention. She maybe kind of has to.

• 6:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  Because along with being a Scottish folk music celebrity, Iona Fyfe is a celebrity rector at the University of Aberdeen.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  It's a, an ancient title, um, created for the ancient universities in Scotland, um, St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, um, and it's an ancient Scots law.

• 6:37Amory Sivertson?

  So basically, in the university setting, we're talking about a representative who works on behalf of the students and is at the table with board members, university administrators, et cetera.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  I think I might be the youngest ever rector, which is cool.

• 6:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Iona takes her rector-ness seriously. She's advocated to keep honors credits for a language study at the university for musicians' interests, and in 2026, this advocacy means also wading into some of the biggest issues for college and university students right now that go far beyond campus.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  For example, we have some students that we are supporting from Palestine. We're trying to help with evacuation efforts.

• 7:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  And here's the thing, it's kind of like making Scott a shortbread. You take a few simple ingredients, butter, sugar, flour, no two ways about it, you're gonna get some sweet, coothee shortbread. That's just what's gonna happen.

• 7:40Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, not sure we're using that word correctly, but when your simple ingredients are celebrity, politics, and internet, you're gonna get something less coothee and less sweet. That's also just what's gonna happen. And in the beginning of the year, that's what happened to Iona, thanks to X's generative AI chatbot, Grok.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  Then I saw the one at Grok replaced her outfit with dental floss, and they did, they did it, and it looked so real. I was like, oh, ugh.

• 8:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Not Feeling Coothee About This Story Johnson.

• 8:20Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Amory Not Feeling So Sweet Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 8:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode?

• 8:29Amory Sivertson?

  Grok Gets Gross. Ugh.

• 8:39Amory Sivertson?

  It's tough to tell these days where the messiest stories are gonna come from. There is a lot happening in real life that's just difficult.

• 8:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  But the online dumpster fire is holding its own in the competition, and it got an early start in 2026.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  New Year's Eve 2025, I posted a little photo saying, "All along sign, Happy New Years," and it was a photo of me in a tartan dress in like a little whiskey bar that looked a very Scottish backdrop, holding a little whiskey in my hand.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Simple.

• 9:17Amory Sivertson?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, pretty, pretty, I would say, pretty, uh, normal New Year's Eve post.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Inocuous, yeah.

• 9:26Amory Sivertson?

  So when, um, when and how did you realize that people were using Grok to alter this image?

• 9:35Speaker 05

  I think on the second or the third of January, I started seeing

• 9:41Speaker 05

  other people's images being altered with Grok, people posting about it, other conversations on different apps saying, oh, goodness me, what next for Twitter? That's all, or what next for X? And then I scrolled down to my previous post and then in the like folded other comments, I'd seen that people were asking Grok to change the image. But I definitely didn't like scroll through it in order to, I, I didn't think that it was even going to happen to me because I was like, why, like, it, yeah, I was just like, what's the point

• 10:22Speaker 05

  in this? And some of it was innocuous and some of it was just wild. And then over the course of the first week of January, it got horrific.

• 10:36Amory Sivertson?

  Iona was far from the only one who noticed what was happening. Early in the new year, a host of X users started to notice that Elon Musk's X-based chatbot Grok had a new feature. Musk himself had been promoting the latest version of the app, but the latest version had a feature that was being used by a lot of people and presumably bots on X.

• 10:58Speaker 06

  Elon Musk's AI Grok has been fiercely criticized in recent days after the chatbot began generating sexualized images of women and girls. Grok and the social network X.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  have been under fire for several days. Elon Musk was forced to put more restrictions on his social media platform X and its AI chatbot Grok this week after its image generators sparked outrage around the world.

• 11:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  Iona herself had already started to see examples of this in the wild.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  I saw a Grok edited video of a previous Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who I never ever agreed with her politics. She's not great, but goodness me, it was horrible. She was, it was a picture of her in Parliament and the Grok video had had her stand up and had her take basically all of her clothes off to just make like her in her underwear. And I thought that's goodness me, that is like, I was disgusted at that. It was horrible. But yeah, I then I was like, oh, I wonder if this is happening to me. And I scrolled down and I was like, oh, yes, it has.

• 12:04Amory Sivertson?

  We should say that the creepy replies to Iona in her tartan dress on New Year's Eve represent a kind of weird spectrum, not just sexually explicit, or at least not obviously explicit.

• 12:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  On X, the way this works, by the way, is that you just mention at Grok in a tweet with a request or a prompt, and it replies in that same X thread with its response.

• 12:31Speaker 05

  So one of the more innocuous prompt was asking Grok to add a Grimace drinking a milkshake next to me. And I, I think I totally ignored that one because I was like, oh, well, right. Okay. If we're just getting a laugh, then right, it's not that crazy.

• 12:54Amory Sivertson?

  And this is Grimace, the McDonald's, the big purple guy.

• 12:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, the big purple thingy. And it added it in and there we have me with my whiskey, Grimace with a milkshake. And I kind of like laughed at that. I was like, oh, that's kind of funny.

• 13:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  We are gonna come back to this one.

• 13:13Amory Sivertson?

  Yes, we will. But moving on, the next prompt Iona saw was the one where a user asked Grok to replace her clothing with dental floss, which would obviously make her outfit not safe for work.

• 13:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  But this Grok image maybe didn't do what the user was going for. Iona's tartan dress was replaced by a heavily woven, full-body-covering tangle of floss. It almost looked... Designer?

• 13:40Speaker 05

  It definitely just looked like dental floss was the dress. And then it devolved a little bit further. Someone asked Grok, "Change her clothes to kebaya, keep clothes color, and sangle her hair. Make her representable, like royal family. Keep the background hair color and pose." And then Grok did this. It was wild how realistic it looked. And I was like, okay, I don't even know what culture they are trying to impose on me here.

• 14:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Then users kept going.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  @Grok, could you add 10 Nigerian guys behind her, all staring at her? So there was racial undertones to that, of course. And it did it. And it all just looked so real. And that's what felt quite violating about it.

• 14:38Amory Sivertson?

  This image evokes something that Iona doesn't describe to Ben and me out loud. But it suggests a genre of pornography where a large group of men have sex with a woman at the same time. Often, there are supposed or suggested racial taboos overlaid on this type of video.

• 14:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  The problem here, of course, is not pornography or kink. It's a lack of consent.

• 15:04Amory Sivertson?

  But remember, Iona called herself extremely online: a musician, a celebrity rector, and an activist. So number one, she's not gonna take this Grok grossness. And number two, she has had some experience standing up for what she believes in.

• 15:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  And standing against things she does not.

• 15:24Speaker 05

  And I was door knocking for this political party. I was making my views known about how rubbish Brexit was gonna be for us all, blah, blah, blah. That's when it happened.

• 15:39Amory Sivertson?

  In a minute, how Iona's experience with Grok got even grosser, how she's speaking out, and what she thinks might come next.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 16:20Speaker 07

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• 16:29Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 17:16Speaker 02

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• 17:46Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so Iona Fyffe discovers she's one of many victims of Grok's updated features, including the ability to, when prompted, undress women online via their real photos without their consent.

• 18:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's possible Iona has been attacked in this way online because she's taken clear stances on some political issues in the UK. But she's also got the experience from taking those clear stances. Even as a teenager, Iona was interested in the Scottish National Party. In fact, the first legal vote she cast in the UK as a voting citizen was for Scottish independence.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  So I got involved in the party during that turbulent time. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, the COVID pandemic, the SNAP elections, the Brexit trade deals. It was a very interesting and unstable time in European politics. And that's not the be all and end all of activism that I do, but it kind of gave me an anchor.

• 18:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  To be clear, not a big fan of Brexit, but a fan of Scottish independence. And the anchor she has gotten from delving into those politics has helped her with other things she's taken on.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a community of people with opposite political views to me that have trolled me for years, since maybe 2019 is probably when it all started. You know, when I was, when we had a SNAP election, like age 21. And it's just like, general trolling about views, which is great, or like debate, healthy debate, but then more so people would focus on like...

• 19:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is it great?

• 19:26Speaker 05

  Um, maybe not trolling about views, but healthy debate about views, saying, "Oh, I don't agree with Iona's take on this. Like, why is she supporting this party, blah, blah, blah." Like, you know, people who wanted the UK to be independent of Europe, who were maybe... Interested in conservatism and unionism and this idea of like make Britain great again, all that kind of stuff. That's fine to have separate views, but when they start, when it devolves into just insulting what you look like or your music, like that's, well, insulting your music's fine, right? But when it's just what you look like and who you are as a person.

• 20:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  In terms of the images, which ones were the most disturbing to you and why? Would you be willing to talk a little bit about that?

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm going to be honest, the most disturbing image that I have seen, one of them that I've seen that is relation to my face being added on to something was a post from 30th of September 2023 from an account called Mike Stewart 79, who I have, I've been to the police about. This account had added me and added a newspaper that I had previously written articles for with the word reap what you sow, dot, dot, dot. And the picture is of my face added into a very dirty naked woman who has nothing on her but like a burlap jute, like potato sack.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  It's my face, you can evidently see it's me, and they have added the SNP, the Scottish National Party, logo onto, like as a badge onto my chest with the word cult on it. It's just a bit horrid, just not nice. And that was shared a lot by other accounts, don't know who made it.

• 21:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  I did also have to, after quickly looking into it during our conversation, share with Iona some news about Grok's grimace milkshake image of her. I looked up the grimace thing because I was like, I think this is a meme and it is a meme. It's like a horror meme where in theory you drink the milkshake and then you die.

• 21:50Speaker 05

  Oh, so it is more sinister.

• 21:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  It is actually more sinister than it would appear.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Oh, that's a shame.

• 22:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm sad to, I'm sad to share that with you, but that's.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  Oh, rubbish.

• 22:09Amory Sivertson?

  This most recent round of online harassment, the gross Grok round, also got stranger.

• 22:16Speaker 05

  I woke up last week to an email from the University of Aberdeen saying, oh, we've seen this tweet and we've reported it. If you could report it too, maybe ask your followers to report it. That would be great. And it was a tweet from a very anonymous account that wasn't really that active. It had lifted a video that I had recorded with University of Aberdeen for our rector's Christmas lunch, edited it, put a really bad North American accent. So for the first like five, 10, 15 seconds, it was me speaking. And then they had changed the whole course of the video.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  And it was Russian talking points. And then they had tagged the university, Reuters, different news outlets, just really weird stuff.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  And the whole video used the watermark of the university. And it was misrepresentation. It wasn't, I don't know if they edited with Grok. I don't think they did because, you know, it added in watermarks. It, you know, had sliced up different images of different things. But I noticed that it was up, it's still up. And the views count on it. It looks dodgy, like it only had 140 odd retweets, but not public retweets from accounts that you could publicly see. But it had over 430,000 views. If that is the real numbers, that's a lot of people

• 23:57Speaker 05

  who now thinks that my face is now helping to propagate Russian talking points. I was like, oh, this is concerning in my brain.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  I'm more concerned about that and the fallout of that than I am someone editing the cotton, the floss on me as a dress.

• 24:22Amory Sivertson?

  So you reported it. Hopefully, some of your followers reported it too, it sounds like. The university reported it, but it's still up. So did you get any sort of correspondence back from X saying we're working on it or anything?

• 24:39Speaker 05

  Literally, no, I did not. There isn't a very easy way to report something for misinformation. You can report something for targeted harassment, tropes, illicit photo sharing, especially if somebody is under the age of consent. There's all these different ways to report something on X, but not a very clear one for misinformation propaganda. I haven't had a response back on that one, but to be honest, I do report quite a number of things.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  In the past, I've reported much, much more sinister posts and it never violated anything, according to them. So I've totally lost faith. The UK has introduced a law around undressing and I've noticed that in reporting tools on X, there is a separate reporting tool for all UK illegal content. And they've acted relatively quickly on this. I wonder if there'd be legal implications if not.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  But now there is a way to report foreign interference offenses, false communications, animal welfare, firearms and other weapons, unlawful immigration, human trafficking offenses, sexual exploitation of adults, not just minors, extreme pornography, intimate image abuse, cyber flashing, epilepsy trolling. So it feels like the the UK part of reporting is now much more comprehensive. So maybe when I report other things, I will use that. So let's let's hope that there can be some good change happening. Yeah.

• 26:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  So you described not a lot of response from X in general when you report this stuff. I am looking at one email, it looks like, that was sent to you. Thanks for your report. We've reviewed the account you reported and have actioned it accordingly because we found it to be in violation of the X rules. This is from January 7th. Do you know what that one was for?

• 26:57Speaker 05

  If I remember correctly, that was when someone had called me a dirty Jew, I believe.

• 27:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Got it.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  But yeah, sometimes there's things that are taken seriously, which is great, and sometimes not.

• 27:14Amory Sivertson?

  And this is the hard part when you're someone like Iona, right? Not only do you need to do the emotional work of deciding as a user what to report or fight against, trying to pay attention to that feeling in your gut.

• 27:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  But you also need to deal with this whole other layer that's honestly not very transparent, which threats, non-consented to Grok images undressing you or putting you in very weird contextual situations without you asking, which of these threats is the company going to take seriously? And how will it explain its logic to you? It sounds like with X, you're lucky if you ever hear back.

• 27:51Amory Sivertson?

  We talked to Iona back in January. We don't know if she's gotten a response from X with regards to that Russian propaganda video that she reported to them, but you can't find that video on X anymore. The account of the user who posted it has been suspended. As you can probably tell, Europe and the UK, Brexit or no, are dealing with tech companies on these issues in distinct ways, even for Iona, who is certainly team, please don't use Grok to do gross stuff to my photos on the internet. It's not totally clear what should come next.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  It's a slippery slope if we think about banning things. And could you imagine the uproar if one government over another was like, yeah, no more X, the end? You know, we're seeing a bit of an uproar in the UK right now because the UK government is, I think, looking into the idea of no social media for under 16, similar to the Australian government.

• 28:50Speaker 05

  And when I think about it, I'm like, yeah, maybe my life would have been a little bit easier if I just didn't have a smartphone until I was a little bit older. I think I was maybe fourteen, fourteen or so. But the critics of this thing, oh, nanny state, awful, blah, blah, blah. I do believe that we should allow people to have their own choices and all that kind of stuff. So I'm concerned about this. But if it shows to increase, you know, better mental health within our young people, then great. But that research should be, we can look to Australia for that, I guess, maybe. But it should be scientific and it should be well, well established before we make laws on who can or can't access social media. I mean, I loved accessing YouTube when I was super young because I

• 29:35Speaker 05

  learned loads of folk songs through it, which was such a weird sentence to say.

• 29:43Amory Sivertson?

  The folk songs of YouTube.

• 29:48Amory Sivertson?

  The Highlands of YouTube.

• 29:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  However safe the future Highlands of YouTube will be, from Scotland to Australia to the US.

• 30:08Amory Sivertson?

  To say nothing of the swamps of X.

• 30:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  We don't know yet. Here's what we do know.

• 30:13Amory Sivertson?

  Two weeks after the undressing started, X put out an announcement, quote, "We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing." Government officials described the development as vindication.

• 30:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Elon Musk, who loves to use his X megaphone for lots of things, spent the brief and furious few weeks of global controversy talking about the popularity of the Grok app, which exists along with Grok's account on X, and spikes in Google searches about Grok. Popular because, spiking in Google searches because.

• 30:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hard to know.

• 30:55Amory Sivertson?

  One wonders.

• 30:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  He eventually characterized the criticism as an excuse for suppressing free speech.

• 31:03Amory Sivertson?

  For now, the UK's telecom regulator, Ofcom, and technology secretary in the UK, Liz Kendall, seem prepared to limit and even block access to X if needed. Free speech limitation, or preventing sexual attacks on women, celebrity rectors, and government officials online. We're left to wonder what a more kuthy internet might look and feel like.

• 31:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  And we hope that Iona, while she's watching out for astucies, tizzies, rumpuses on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, can stay in control of her own image and avoid the deadly milkshakes. And you know, balance that screen time with music time, Highland time.

• 31:45Speaker 05

  I do need to get the hell off of my phone. That's what I need to do. And that's what I think I'll intend on being more aware of when things are just too much. You know, if what I'm consuming is too much, and also how I'm feeling about people using my image or talking about me or whatnot. I think the answer to both of those things is to just touch grass, get inside.

• 32:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Iona, thank you very much for talking with us about all this.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 32:27Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson and produced and co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson, and...

• 32:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Me, Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mixed and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes.

• 32:43Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Grace Tatter, Dean Russell, Kalyani Saxena, Chiosna Bernado, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Sumit Joshi.

• 32:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and something that's kuthy not stucci? Eh?

• 33:00Amory Sivertson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, [email protected].

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 33:51Speaker 07

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 33:58Speaker 07

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.