A couple weeks ago Women + AI had their second dinner in LA, and honestly the room impressed me even more than the first one, the caliber of women in there is a little unreal.
Women + AI, if you haven't come across it yet, is a community Kylee Hayden started out of her SF apartment (a couple thousand women deep now), built around these dinners where a bunch of smart, curious, mostly non-techy women get together and talk about how they're actually using AI in their real lives. No bro energy, and nobody trying to sell you a $2,000 course (praised be); just women being genuinely nosy about each other's open tabs & trying to figure things out together
One of the reasons I am such a fan of what Kylee made is that I get a front row seat to how curious women play with new technology, and it lights a fire under me to try things I never would have touched on my own. I always leave with about nine tabs open and a slightly unhinged to-do list of things to try.
It also poked at something I have been sitting with lately..when you live in LA you have to be weirdly intentional about who you keep around you. The city is big and flaky and it will happily let you float off into your own little bubble, so you kind of have to curate your people on purpose (yes, curate, I said what I said). There’s that Jim Rohn line that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, and I think about it constantly. If that’s true, I want my five to be women to be way more smart and more curious than me,the ones who make me feel a little behind in the best possible way . So consider this my slightly less cheesy argument for keeping company with people who are a few steps ahead. Not to compete with them, just to keep moving alonside them
Jen , who founded Tot Squad, mentioned almost in passing that she runs her life on an AI tool called Town, and then casually revealed it had built her a three page dossier on a seven year business relationship using nothing but her old emails. It also caught a leak on her LA DWP bill that had been quietly overcharging her, and hunted down a solar company through four different name changes. She pays around two grand a year for it. The human assistant she used to pay for this kind of work cost her $3,500 a month. I did the math at the table and felt a little faint..
Natalie, a fashion designer, used to make 150 physical samples for every buyer meeting. One hundred and fifty. Now she runs an AI pipeline that takes her sketch and generates the colorways, the fabric variations, even the video, so she can show buyers the whole collection first and only produce the pieces they actually want. The amount of waste she has cut is wild, and it pretty much killed my leftover suspicion that AI in fashion is all slop. In the right hands, its a sampling room that fits inside a laptop.
Almost every table wanted to learn the same thing, how to build a personal “second brain.” Basically an AI trained on your whole life so it actually knows your context instead of starting from zero every time. Francis built one she calls Frankie Brain, hooked up to her Slack and email and Asana, so the half formed ideas she texts herself at 11pm come back to her as reminders in the morning. Jenny, who does marketing AT OpenAI, has one too. My favorite thing she said is that building it feels less like data entry and more like scrapbooking. You have to curate what goes in, not just dump your entire existence in there and hope. Taste, again. It keept coming up all night
This one is for my moms. Jenny takes a photo of the paper school calendar, you know the exact one, the crumpled one living at the bottom of the bag, and has a little Gemini setup turn it into Google Calendar events. Then she has it text the reminders to her husband too. She is quietly redistributing the mental load to a robot ( geniius!!!!)
There was a really good argument about taste. As everyone gets access to the same tools, what is going to separate the good stuff from the forgettable? Natalie’s position was that “slop reflects the operator, not the tool,” meaning if your output is generic, that’s a you problem. Sarah pushed back that cream still rises but AI mostly amplifies whoever is loudest, not whoever is best. I have a lot of opinions on this but ill save it for later.. what do you guys think?
Here is the one I keep thinking about. There’s a few women using AI as a kind of therapist or coach, and one had actually uploaded a full year of her real therapy sessions so the bot would mirror her therapist’s voice. Which, wow… But somebody at the table said the scary part isn’t AI getting things wrong, it’s AI agreeing with you. ChatGPT especially will happily tell you what you want to hear. Claude will push back a little harder. If you don’t have the training to clock the difference, you can basically build yourself an echo chamber of one and start outsourcing your own gut( Heavy stuff for 9pm on a Tuesday)
The conversation that made us all gasp was about our faces. There is a genuinely predatory corner of the wellness world using AI generated avatars of real women to sell weight loss junk, and it goes straight for women who are midlife or freshly divorced. Meanwhile talent agencies are now making AI clones of their own clients just to own the likeness before anyone else can.(!!!!!) But there was a flip side, because Natalie uses that same technology to put women over 50 and bodies that are nowhere near sample size into campaigns that traditional media never would have booked. Same tool, completely opposite intentions. Which is kind of the whole story of AI, isn’t it?
One tiny gift before I go. If your AI ever gets stuck in that endless thinking spiral, just type “cough it up” and it will stop stalling and hand you whatever it has so far. An engineer at the dinner shared it and it has already saved me twice this week.
Every time I leave one of these dinners I feel a little smarter and a lot more inspired, which is exactly why I keep showing up. Our next LA dinner is September 14th, and I would genuinely love to see your face there.
Come be one of my five
Besos,
Victoria
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