Seattle AI Society

A meetup group fostering curiosity about the societal impacts of artificial intelligence

It was a dark and stormy night in late November 2022.

Kidding. Well, not really. It’s always dark and stormy in Seattle in late November.

At that point, I had spent years working with emerging technologies at Microsoft, but it wasn’t until ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022, that a technology wouldn’t let me sleep. For the first time, a powerful generative AI system had been packaged in a way that ordinary people could use. It wasn’t just a tool for researchers or technologists anymore. It was becoming a the new default interface between humans and knowledge. Humans and expression. Humans and each other. Humans and themselves. Humans and…

At one o’clock in the morning, I gave up trying to sleep, grabbed my iPad, and walked down the block to my favorite dive bar. I handed ChatGPT to the bartender and asked him to try it. Without missing a beat, he typed:

“Does God exist?”

Well, that didn’t help.

Before the holidays sent us all home to our loved ones, I snuck in one last coffee with a colleague who had recently been tasked with shaping AI safety policies. She told me she was currently working to prevent AI from freely sharing recipes for methamphetamine.

Hm. That’s good, right? Probably? Or is this just The Anarchist Cookbook all over again? And, who gets to decide what else is blocked? If AI becomes the primary way people learn, wonder, strategize, and create, then the people building these systems will hold extraordinary influence over human expression and access to knowledge.

My boyfriend and I rang in the 2023 new year together by posting a message on Meetup.com: anyone want to talk about AI?

Thirty-two random people showed up at our apartment building the next week. Some were engineers. Others were artists, entrepreneurs, students, writers, and curious neighbors. Everyone seemed to be carrying the same nervous energy. AI was arriving faster than society knew how to process, and people were looking for a place to think about it together.

That evening became the seed of what would eventually become the Seattle AI Society.

Alongside my co-founder, Paul Payne, a Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft, and many other volunteers, speakers, organizers, and community members, we built a space dedicated to exploring the social, ethical, and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. What began as a conversation in our living room grew into a community of more than 1,800 members and over 50 events across the Seattle area. The community continues to live on through our Meetup group.

While I helped structure the group by organizing events, designing activities, facilitating discussions, and creating interactive exhibits, the Seattle AI Society was always a collective effort. Its strength came from the diversity of perspectives people brought into the room. Engineers sat beside artists. Engineers debated philosophers. Students challenged experts. The goal was never to provide answers. It was to create an environment where difficult questions could be explored thoughtfully and collaboratively.

Paul and I intentionally designed experiences that encouraged participants to move beyond passive consumption and engage directly with ideas. One of my favorite activities asked a deceptively simple question:

What is one thing you wish everyone in the world had more of?

People responded with ideas like empathy, water, knowledge, trust, and time. We then explored how AI might increase or decrease access to those things and what tradeoffs might emerge.

As the community grew, we began creating larger public experiences. One highlight was an interactive exhibit we designed for the PBS Ideas Festival. I led the design of the booth and created a custom GPT called Rhetoric & Bias Analyzer, while many others contributed ideas, facilitation, logistics, and programming. Together, we built an experience that invited participants to examine media for persuasion techniques, omissions, framing choices, and bias. Our goal was not to tell people what to think. It was to give them tools to think more critically about the information they consume and the systems increasingly shaping that information.

Looking back, what I am most proud of is not the growth of the organization or the number of events we hosted. It is that, during a period of time where technology was moving extraordinarily fast, we created a place where people could slow down, ask difficult questions, and think through them together.