WOMEN IN AI

AI musical, 2026

One night in early 2026, I woke up at 2am, literally drenched in sweat, and realized that since I started working with AI in 2022, almost everyone around me in this field was a man. So I found around forty women working with AI on LinkedIn and contacted them. Many felt the same.

As a former child actress with a lifelong attachment to musicals, I’d been walking around singing “No Women in AI” to the tune of Good Morning Baltimore from Hairspray. Then Higgsfield (a company already facing accusations of misleading marketing and promoting nonconsensual deepfakes) announced an AI action-film contest with $500,000 in prizes. I had 36 hours to make something. So naturally, I made a musical.

I wrote the lyrics myself, since language models couldn’t quite handle meter, recorded myself singing them into Suno, and reconstructed scenes from Hairspray, Mission: Impossible, and The Matrix using generative models. I also filmed myself dubbing the characters and synchronized everything manually.

But there was a small problem. My protagonist was Tracy Turnblad, played by Nikki Blonsky in Hairspray in 2007. And in making a film about women’s representation, I’d used a real woman’s face without asking her.

That contradiction became the starting point for a documentary I’m developing about AI, representation, and who gets to decide what happens to our images.