The first two tbd/con talks are up
Cecilia Dobbs on whether we should dehumanize LLMs, and Shawn Terry on what reviewing AI's work really asks of people.
The first recordings from tbd/con 2026 are up on the tbd/con YouTube channel. Two talks from day one, from two different circles: one about how we talk about AI, and one about how we build with it.
Transformers and Decepticons: Should we dehumanize LLMs?
Cecilia Dobbs, Information circle, 21 minutes
People usually embrace a new technology for one of two reasons: they understand how it works, or it reliably does what it promises. Cecilia argues that generative AI passes neither test, and that people embrace it anyway because of the words we use for it. Call it intelligent, give it agency and intent, and people start to believe it works the way they do. Her answer to the title question is yes: describe these systems as the pattern-recognition machines they are, and the technology and its limits come into view.
She closes with two thought exercises, one for journalists and news readers and one for people who use AI and the leaders who decide how their organizations use it. Then she takes a question from a linguist in the audience: can we really dehumanize machines that talk to us?
AI in the product vs. AI to create the product
Shawn Terry, Garage circle, 23 minutes
Shawn, an operations leader who taught himself to build with AI, set out to have AI turn written crochet patterns into charts. It made charts that looked right and couldn't actually be crocheted, until he took AI out of the answer and let ordinary code handle that part.
From there he asks what "a human reviews it" really asks of the human. Checking AI's work is a different job from doing the work. Automation makes people stop looking closely. And the hardest mistakes to catch are the things that are missing.
Why you only see the speakers
People in the audience didn't sign up to be recorded, so their questions appear on screen in our own words, without names. That took longer to edit than we planned, which is why these are later than we said.
What's next
More talks from the con are coming over the coming days. Subscribe on YouTube so you catch the next one.
Thank you to Cecilia and Shawn for letting us share their talks.
Zig