Humans of AI

Hosted by Alex Chao

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Oct 2026

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In the race to build AI, we forget that it was made by real people, with real stories. These are their stories. Inspired by the photoblog "Humans of New York", this series is a video podcast showcasing the different people who are either building things in AI or are using it in their daily lives. If you think you would make a good guest or want to sponsor the podcast, send me a note at alex@humansofai.xyz

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25 recent

October 14, 2026Episode 1048 min

What AI Can't Replace About Journalism - Jessica Davis

Can journalism embrace AI without losing the trust that makes it valuable? In this episode of Humans of AI, I sit down with Jessica Davis, former VP of AI Product at USA Today, to explore how AI is reshaping journalism, what it takes to build trustworthy AI systems, and why the future of news may depend more than ever on distinctly human judgment, relationships, and community. Jessica shares a behind-the-scenes example of building AI tools for journalists. Her team developed a system to help reporters draft, file, and track public-records requests improving accuracy from roughly 70% to the high 90s through rigorous evaluations, real newsroom examples, and direct feedback from journalists. But working on this project revealed a key insight: trustworthy AI isn't just about choosing the right model. It's about defining what success looks like, understanding the real-world consequences of failure, and empowering domain experts to shape how AI systems are evaluated and governed. Jessica and I explore the transition from "human in the loop" to "human on the loop," the growing challenges of misinformation and AI literacy, and how AI-powered answer engines are transforming the economics of journalism. We also ask a deeper question: What remains uniquely human about journalism when AI can generate and summarize information almost instantly? For Jessica, the answer lies in firsthand reporting, meaningful relationships, local communities, accountability, and the ability to bring people together around stories that matter. The conversation closes with Jessica's personal journey: from building products at USA Today to life in Nashville with her family, competitive tennis, gardening, and her reflections on what comes next.

October 9, 2026Episode 91 hr 17 min

AI Knows the Bible. But Can It Be Wise? - Michael Graham

AI can ace a Bible knowledge test. But does that mean we should trust it with questions of faith, morality, and wisdom? In this episode of Humans of AI, I sit down with Michael Graham of The Gospel Coalition and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics about their 2026 AI Christian Benchmark, which evaluates leading AI models across theological reliability, Christian ethics, relational attachment, and Bible knowledge. One of the benchmark’s most striking findings is also one of its biggest paradoxes: today’s AI models can retrieve biblical knowledge with extraordinary accuracy, yet give dramatically different answers when asked questions about morality, theology, relationships, and how people should live. We unpack what explains that gap. How much of an AI’s answer comes from what it learned during pre-training and how much comes from the human decisions made during alignment, post-training, and product design? Why does a small change in prompting radically change a model’s ethical answers? And when an AI appears “neutral,” whose assumptions are actually shaping that neutrality? We also explore principled pluralism, Michael’s proposal for how AI systems could handle religious questions more faithfully: rather than flattening every question into a survey of competing viewpoints, models could first represent a religious tradition accurately on its own terms before introducing alternative perspectives. The conversation then moves beyond benchmarking into some of the deeper questions AI is forcing us to confront: Is AI conscious? And should AI systems ever receive moral consideration or welfare rights? Ultimately, this is a conversation about more than how AI affects Christians. It is about the values being embedded into increasingly powerful systems, who gets to shape those values, and what kinds of authority we should (or shouldn’t) give artificial intelligence in our lives. Learn more about the AI Christian Benchmark at ChristianBenchmark.ai and the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics at thekellercenter.org.

September 22, 2026Episode 847 min

Can AI Be Trusted to Judge AI? - Sampura Research (Josh Jacob and Rishub Jain)

As AI systems become more capable, who or what can reliably judge whether their behavior is correct, safe, and aligned? In this episode of Humans of AI, I sit down with Rishub Jain and Josh Jacob, co-founders of Sampura Research, an independent nonprofit exploring how humans and AI can work together to oversee increasingly powerful systems. Rishub and Josh explain why better AI “judges” may be central to the future of alignment. Many of the hardest behaviors to evaluate are subjective, ambiguous, or difficult to verify—and neither humans nor AI systems are reliable enough to handle every case alone. Sampura’s research on " human–AI complementarity " asks how the strengths of each can be combined to create more trustworthy evaluations, stronger benchmarks, and oversight methods that continue to work as models improve. We discuss what meaningful benchmarks for AI judges should look like, where human judgment remains essential, and how scalable oversight connects to the larger challenge of robust alignment. Rishub and Josh also share why they left Google DeepMind to start Sampura, how they are shaping the organization’s culture and research agenda, and the unexpected operational realities of building an independent research lab. Learn more about Sampura Research: https://sampura.org/

September 11, 2026Episode 740 min

Andrew McLuhan: The Medium Is the Message. So What Is AI Telling Us?

How is AI reshaping not only what we do, but who we are? In this episode of Humans of AI, we chat with Andrew McLuhan, a poet, writer, researcher, and the founder and director of The McLuhan Institute, where he develops and teaches ways of analyzing the nature of technologies and their personal and social effects. As the grandson of renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the son of Eric McLuhan, Andrew brings a perspective shaped by three generations of thinking about how media and technology transform human life. Andrew explains why artificial intelligence should be understood as more than just another tool. AI is becoming part of the environment around us, reshaping how we think, create, communicate, trust information, and understand ourselves. We unpack Marshall McLuhan’s famous idea that “the medium is the message,” why focusing only on the content produced by AI can distract us from its deeper effects, and what earlier shifts—from oral culture and print to radio, television, and the internet—can teach us about the present moment. We also explore how AI overviews and agents are changing search, discoverability, and the economics of publishing; why the risks of AI extend beyond automation to mental fatigue, weakened judgment, trust erosion, and value misalignment; and how every technology strengthens certain human abilities while allowing others to fade. Andrew offers a practical way to evaluate new technologies against our personal, family, and community values—and asks which parts of ourselves we should be unwilling to outsource. Andrew also shares his unconventional path from punk rock, poetry, and furniture upholstery to carrying forward the work of Marshall and Eric McLuhan. The result is a wide-ranging conversation about media, culture, identity, consciousness, and the question underneath nearly every debate about AI: not only “What can this technology do?” but “What is it doing to us?” Learn more about Andrew and his work: The McLuhan Institute: https://themcluhaninstitute.com/ Andrew McLuhan: https://andrewmcluhan.com/

August 27, 2026Episode 61 hr 7 min

Kasra Gaharian: AI Can Flag Gambling Risk. But Can It Reduce Harm?

How is AI reshaping the gambling industry? In this episode of Humans of AI, I chat with Kasra Gaharian, the Director of Research at UNLV International Gaming Institute, where he leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data science, and gambling. Kasra breaks down the state of AI in gaming, the rise of prediction markets, and why the future of betting may depend as much on regulation and consumer protection as it does on model capability. We unpack the distinction between "gaming" and "gambling," why the industry uses softer language, and how trust is built through regulation, fair-play systems, and responsible gambling tools. They also get into the probabilistic mindset behind games of chance, cognitive distortions that make players overestimate skill, and the challenge of helping consumers understand risk before it turns into harm. Read Kasra's research on "The State of AI in Gaming 2026" here: https://www.igiairhub.com/state-of-ai/ If you would like to be a guest or sponsor the podcast, send me a note at alex@humansofai.xyz 🎙️ Connect with the hosts: Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/subscribe 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Kasra Gaharian https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasrag/ #humansofai #gambling #gaming #lasvegas #safety #risk #protection #regulation

August 18, 2026Episode 554 min

Ben Goertzel - Why Decentralization is the Path to AGI

In this episode of Humans of AI, I chat with Ben Goertzel, AI researcher, mathematician, and one of the pioneers of artificial general intelligence, having coined the term back in 2005. Ben is the founder and CEO of SingularityNET and he has spent decades exploring intelligence, consciousness, and what it might mean to create machines with increasingly general minds. He is now also the founder of BGI Labs aiming to chart a path toward building Beneficial General Intelligence.Ben says the next breakthrough in AGI may not come from bigger transformers at all. Rather, the real bottleneck is deeper: memory, continual learning, metacognition, and architectures that can actually keep improving without forgetting what they learned yesterday. Ben also argues that AGI shouldn’t be concentrated in the hands of a single company, country, or small group of institutions. The more powerful these systems become, the more important it is that they’re built on open, distributed infrastructure rather than locked inside one corporate walled garden. In his view, decentralization isn’t just about ideology, it’s a practical way to make AGI more resilient, more transparent, and ultimately more beneficial for everyone. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction & Why AGI Must Be Decentralized 01:21 - Defining AGI: Generalization vs. Breadth 06:40 - Sparks of AGI & Limitations of Backpropagation 11:07 - Common Model of Cognition & Cognitive Deficits in LLMs 15:45 - OpenCog Hyperon Architecture: AtomSpace & MeTTa 20:19 - Omega Claw, Symbolic Memory & Recursive Self-Improvement 24:40 - The History of Decentralized AI: Webmind to the Modern Web 30:00 - SingularityNET, ASI Chain & Running AI On-Chain 33:36 - Open Source Substrates vs. Corporate Walled Gardens 38:11 - Ben's Journey: Sci-Fi, The Prometheus Project & Early AI 43:07 - Hardware Evolution & The Cultural Shift in AI Research 46:50 - Realistic AGI Timelines & Architectural Scaffolding 50:47 - How the Community Can Get Involved (BGI Labs, Omega Claw) If you would like to be a guest or sponsor the podcast, send me a note at alex@humansofai.xyz 🎙️ Connect with the hosts: Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/subscribe 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Ben Geortzel https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoertzel/ https://bengoertzel.substack.com/https://github.com/asi-alliance/OmegaClaw-Core #humansofai #agi #singularity #architectures #memory #rsi

July 24, 2026Episode 41 hr 24 min

Elijah Rivera - The Future of Learning: Balancing AI and Human Wisdom

In this episode of Humans of AI , I chat with Elijah Rivera, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University, whose research looks at how people learn computer science and how programming languages themselves are designed. Elijah earned his Ph.D. at Brown University, and before that a bachelor’s and master’s at MIT. At Brandeis, he developed and teaches a course on automation in software development that gives students hands-on experience with the modern software toolchain, while also rooting those tools in their respective histories and in the related questions philosophers of technology have continually raised. Overarching this is a broader conviction Elijah keeps pursuing: that computer science is best served by learning to communicate effectively with other disciplines such as cognitive science, philosophy, and theology—and, more importantly, by being willing to listen to their challenges and critiques. Whether you’re a student, an AI engineer, founder, researcher, or simply someone curious about the future of education, I hope you learn as much as I did from my conversation with Elijah. Submit your question Submit your question to the Humans of AI Office Hours, and we may cover it in a future episode: https://forms.gle/iztuQCjLyUe8kXYRA If you would like to be a guest or sponsor the podcast, send me a note at alex@humansofai.xyz . 🎙️ Connect with the hosts Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/subscribe 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Elijah Rivera 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elijaherivera/ #humansofai #ai #education #computerscience #teaching #college

July 8, 2026Episode 31 hr 5 min

Erika Anderson - How can AI be more humane?

In this episode of Humans of AI, I chat with Erika Anderson the founder of Building Humane Technology and co-creator of HumaneBench — an open-source benchmark that asks the question most of the AI industry isn't: not whether AI can perform, but whether it treats you like a person.As a former UN press correspondent and writing professor, Erika combines technical rigor and humanistic grounding to the field of AI accountability. ⏱️ Chapters 01:13 – Intro 02:00 - WSJ article on chatbot behaviors 10:51 – Erika's origin story 18:20 – HumaneBench: From community to benchmark design 37:25 - Silicon Valley wants to hire philosophers 40:35 – Building Humane Technology 47:36 – Office Hours: How do ads shape the way people will relate to AI? 01:02:50 - Outro and words to the audience The WSJ Article: "The Three Chatbot Behaviors That Can Drive Humans to Delusional Thinking" (https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/ai-chatbots-psychology-delusion-662a3663) Submit your question to the Humans of AI Office Hours and we may cover it in a future episode! https://forms.gle/iztuQCjLyUe8kXYRA If you would like to be a guest or sponsor the podcast, send me a note at alex@humansofai.xyz 🎙️ Connect with the hosts: Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/subscribe 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Erika Anderson 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikamanderson/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/ErikaOnFire #humansofai #ai #humanetech #humanebench #benchmarks #evals

March 1, 2026Episode 21 hr 9 min

The Hard Truth About AI Agents: What We Learned Building in Open Source

In this episode of Humans of AI, I sit down with my friend Eric Zhu to unpack what are the frameworks and architectures powering modern AI products today. From our times building Semantic Kernel, Autogen, and GraphRAG at Microsoft , we offer a retrospective on the evolution of this space and where we think it'll go in 2026 and beyond. We dive into how AI systems are actually being built today, why early agent frameworks were brittle, and what’s changing as models, tooling, and abstractions improve. Eric shares insights from hands-on experience building AI systems, including lessons around memory, orchestration, open source, and why building has become dramatically faster than even a few years ago. We also talk about the human side of all this—how builders should think about careers in AI, avoiding burnout, and navigating a fast-moving field without getting overwhelmed. Whether you’re an AI engineer, founder, researcher, or just curious about where things are headed, this conversation goes deep into the why behind modern AI systems. ⏱️ Chapters 00:00 – Intro 02:02 - Welcoming Eric Zhu! Experiences building open-source systems from PhD to Industry 11:18 – Early agent systems, frameworks, and brittle abstractions 20:18 – Multi-agent frameworks and why it was hard to go beyond a demo 25:47 – From autonomous agents to workflow orchestration - a trough of disillusionment? 30:00 – Breathing new life into agents with Claude Code 34:35 – "Harness" Engineering and what goes into building agent systems? 39:08 – The importance of data and data representations (i.e knowledge graphs, structured data) 45:57 – Lessons from building in Open Source 56:54 – Office Hours: How to not get left behind in AI Submit your question to the Humans of AI Office Hours and we may cover it in a future episode! https://forms.gle/iztuQCjLyUe8kXYRA 🎙️ Connect with the hosts: Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Eric Zhu 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ekzhu/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/ekzhuAI moves fast. We keep it human.

February 24, 2026Episode 11 hr 25 min

OpenClaw And The Increasing Autonomy of AI Agents

After a long break, the Humans of AI Podcast is back for Season 2! With a new look, new format, new cohosts, and guests, this season will be one you won't want to miss. This week my cohost Tula Masterman and I recap the saga that was OpenClaw — the open-source agentic project that took the internet by storm, spawned an AI social network where agents allegedly conspired to create their own language, and ended with its solo founder joining OpenAI. Plus, we cover new research from Anthropic and OpenAI that reveals what actually happens when humans hand the wheel to agents. We also explore are computer science majors disappearing? Recent data from the University of California seems to suggest so. And we wrap with Humans of AI Office Hours, where we cover user-submitted or curated questions worth digging deeper into. This week's question: "When AGI?" 0:00 Introduction to Humans of AI Podcast Season 21:46 OpenClaw and Agentic Systems2:30 The Rise of OpenClaw5:50 Transition from Chatbots to Agentic Systems7:42 The Importance of Agent Memory10:59 Agentic Execution and Actions20:42 Societal Implications and Agent Uprising27:46 Harness Engineering and Agent Autonomy44:47 Domains of Agent Deployment49:25 OpenAI's Harness Engineering Blog1:08:09 Decline in Computer Science Majors1:18:42 Humans of AI Office Hours: When AGI? Submit your question to the Humans of AI Office Hours and we may cover it in a future episode! https://forms.gle/iztuQCjLyUe8kXYRA 🎙️ Connect with the hosts:Alex Chao 📧 Newsletter: https://alexchao.substack.com/ 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexchao56/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/alexchaomander 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexchaomander Tula Masterman 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tula-masterman/ 🐦 X: https://x.com/tulamasterman 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tulamasterman AI moves fast. We keep it human. Links to stories: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/15/openclaw-creator-peter-steinberger-joins-openai/ https://www.anthropic.com/research/measuring-agent-autonomy https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering /https://developers.openai.com/blog/skills-shell-tips https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/uc-system-decline-computer-science-enrollment/4032197/ #humansofai #ai #openclaw #agents #harness #claudecode #codex #openai #anthropic #csmajor #college

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