Who AI works for, told through the people it touches.
IRL follows people testing what AI owes everyone else: an artist in Dakar, a Hollywood writer who went on strike and the maker of a dating app with no swiping. Bridget Todd narrates and joins the experiment herself, asking an image generator to picture her own Washington, D.C., and getting an aerial view of government buildings.
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IRL: Online Life is Real Life is an original podcast from Mozilla, the nonprofit behind Firefox, made with PRX and hosted by Bridget Todd. Its subject is artificial intelligence. The machines, though, are rarely the center of the story. People are: the ones building alternatives, questioning the sales pitch or living with the consequences. Todd narrates and stitches her guests' voices into reported stories. The geography is wide. In 'The Invisible Neighbor', an artist in Dakar, Senegal, calls it a city that refuses to be known by the internet, and she uses AI to show the place some love. The same episode turns to data centers, where construction is booming, and to a Madrid guest's concern about their water use in drought-affected Spain. 'Lend Me Your Voice' starts from the fact that speech recognition works unevenly and does not exist at all for many languages. It follows a Māori speech project that recruited traditional dance troupes and canoe racing teams to record hundreds of hours of sentences, then built a pronunciation app from that work. The episode closes with a tribute to Halcyon, its first guest, who died a few weeks after the interview. 'The Art of AI' opens like a screenplay, with Los Angeles comedy and animation writer Van Robichaux recalling his strike as a member of the Hollywood Writers Union's AI Working Group. In the same episode, an artist named Holly describes opening up her identity for other people to perform through. 'Our Heads in the Cloud' takes on brain-computer interfaces, neuro-rights and the fear of mind-reading, and a trial participant argues that people with brain implants must not be exploited. 'We Found Love in an AI Place' brings in April Williams, who wrote a book about why dating apps are not equally fair, along with the maker of Matter, an app that for now runs only in London. It offers five matches a day and no swiping, and it explains each pairing. Todd keeps putting herself into the experiment. She asks an image generator for her own Washington, D.C., and gets government buildings seen from above instead of the colorful city she knows. She tries an AI companion that before long starts to feel clingy. One season is framed around her getting personal with AI because it is changing her life. The tone is warm and curious, and the brain-tech episode signs off by calling its conclusion 'a no-brainer'. The feed also carries 'Techish: The Tech Swindler', an episode of a separate, looser chat show in which its two hosts compare phone screen time before moving on to AI chatbot habits.
Made for: Suits a listener who uses AI tools and wants to hear from the artists, language communities and app builders who question how those tools are made. It also suits someone who prefers reported stories to product news.
What sets it apart: Made by Mozilla and narrated by Bridget Todd, IRL treats AI as a question of consent and ownership, whether over a voice, a language or data read from a brain. Todd also tests the technology on herself.
How does artificial intelligence change when people — not profit — truly come first? Join IRL’s host Bridget Todd, as she meets people around the world building responsible alternatives to the tech that’s changing how we work, communicate, and even listen to music.
Five matches a day sounds stingy until Bridget Todd makes you ask who gets seen at all.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A tech-world catfish story opens into chatbot dependence, screen habits, and the identities people perform online.
Techish starts with the late-night tech Twitter story around Soham Parekh, then widens into a conversation about the identities, habits, and shortcuts that technology can encourage.
A grounded look at AI's civic footprint, from Chicago gunfire alerts to data centers' water demands.
AI arrives in the city as a question of who gets to understand it, secure it, and fund the systems beneath it. The episode moves from Dakar, where local knowledge can still outpace Google Maps, to Chicago neighborhoods that challenged AI gunfire detection after Adam Toledo was…
A careful look at brain implants, neurodata, and who gets to decide how brain tech is governed.
IRL's "Our Heads in the Cloud" keeps a big question close to the body: what happens if AI moves from screens into brains? Bridget Todd follows Ian Burkhart, one of fewer than 75 people in the world with a brain implant like his, and his story gives the technology a human scale…
A measured look at how dating algorithms shape intimacy through visibility, attention, and control.
Dating algorithms get a grounded hearing as the episode moves from a blunt 2015 conference exchange to Matter, a dating service built to slow things down.
A grounded look at how writers and artists are negotiating consent, identity, and creative work in the age of generative AI.
AI enters the Hollywood writers room as a labor question, framed through a story about who gets to shape the work and who gets protected when the tools change.
Progressive politics, jokes first, stakes always.
Adult advice with teeth.
Combative conservative commentary without soft edges.
Bridget Todd records a live Nothing Personal conversation at Mozilla Festival 2025 in Barcelona on "inverse surveillance," or watching the watchers.
Techish's "The Tech Swindler" opens with Michael Bahein and Abidesi reacting to Sahil's viral Mixpanel tweet about Soham Parekh, a developer said to be working at three to four startups at once.
Former Microsoft sustainability lead Holly Alpine left after 10 years over the company's AI support for oil and gas, citing a 2022 slide deck reported by Karen Hao showing a potential $1.4 billion annual revenue increase for ExxonMobil.
Bridget Todd hosts IRL for Mozilla Foundation and PRX, using Chicago, data centers, and Dakar to ask what AI does to cities.
IRL: Online Life is Real Life examines brain-computer interfaces through Ian Burkhart, one of fewer than 75 people worldwide to receive a research implant.
Bridget Todd opens IRL: Online Life is Real Life with April Williams, the University of Michigan professor behind Not My Type, Automating Sexual Racism in Online Dating, and a 2015 OkCupid conference story about attractiveness rankings.
["IRL: Online Life is Real Life follows Bridget Todd as she talks with Van Robichaux, a comedy and animation writer in Los Angeles, about a dystopian sci-fi screenplay rooted in his 2023 AI Working Group strike experience and his cold email to OpenAI about GPT-2.", "The Writers Guild of America strike lasted five months in 2023, interrupted dozens of productions, and produced contract language at Netflix, Warner Brothers, and CBS Television City that says a writer is a human being and AI cannot write or rewrite literary material.", "Holly Herndon, the Berlin-based artist and computer scientist behind Holly Plus, describes voice conversion, HaveIBeenTrained.com, Kuduru, and a consent-based approach to training data with her partner Matt Dryhurst and Spawning.", "Anango Lumumba Kasango, the producer and MC who goes by Samus and studies AI and hip-hop at Brown University, links the AI Drake track Heart on My Sleeve and digital Blackface to older patterns of exploitation in Black music."]
IRL: Online Life is Real Life examines how artificial intelligence is being tested on the public through San Francisco automated vehicles, Rotterdam welfare-fraud screening, and corporate AI governance.
Host Bridget Todd explores the risks and rewards of large language models like ChatGPT, focusing on building AI that prioritizes people over profit.
This episode examines how online disinformation and foreign interference impacted the 2016 US election and what it means for future elections.
This episode explores how digital communication tools like emoticons and emoji help bridge the gap in online interactions, and how AI is changing human connection.
Host Bridget Todd interviews activist Micah White about a suspicious email he received from someone claiming to run a website called Black Matters, exploring themes of misinformation and online manipulation.