7/6 Spotlight: Karen Smiley, Founder of She Writes AI

She spent thirty years as the only woman in the room, so she made sure no one else ever would be. On invisibility, generosity, and belonging.

Image created by BAWAI, based on an original drawing by Zsofi Lang

Karen Smiley | SheWritesAI | Everyday Ethical AI | 6 'P's in AI Pods (AI6P)

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The Last Straw

It was late December 2024. Karen Smiley had just wrapped her holiday shopping and was scrolling through Substack to unwind when “the ten AI writers worth following” flashed across her screen.

All men. Not one woman.

She wasn’t angry, exactly. “It was a disappointment, but not really a surprise,” she told me.

By then Karen had spent thirty years in software as “an only,” the lone woman in room after room. So a list of ten men and no women didn’t shock her. It just named, out loud, what she’d been living since college. But this time, it was the last straw.

She even reached out to the writer, who was apologetic about the oversight. But that wasn't the point. "That just should not be happening in 2024."

There’s a line she’s always loved. “Somebody should do something” is the most common reaction in the world, she says, and a toothless one, until it turns into something else.

“I am ‘somebody’. And I can do something. So I will do something about it.”

That was the seed of She Writes AI.

This is her story.

An Only

For three decades, Karen built her career in industrial software, the systems quietly running the factories and infrastructure most of us never think about. Through almost all of it she was the only woman at the table, always bracing herself to be overlooked or discounted, because she usually was.

She didn't just absorb it, though. She'd spent years creating and leading ERGs, giving others the sense of belonging she never had herself.

There was a cost to fitting into rooms not built for her, and she names it plainly.

“I spent too much of my corporate career softening and silencing some of the things I care about most, doing what they wanted and not what I wanted. And I’m done with that.”

Thirty years of making herself smaller. Then, the moment she finally freed herself, she got loud, for everyone else.

A Whole New World

When Karen joined Substack in February 2024, she came to do two things: polish her writing for a book, and broaden her AI knowledge beyond the industrial software world she'd built her career in.

She brought thirty years of corporate software experience, a Director of AI title she’d walked away from for good, and three books circling in her head.

The writers she met were generous with their support and advice.

"The vibe felt like the kind of inclusive and collaborative culture I had always tried to cultivate as a leader," she says, "so that just clicked."

She started small, writing about AI in music, a lifelong love and a domain far enough from her old work to feel safe. Turns out there was a whole world of brilliant AI writers she'd been missing: the women whose voices she'd gone looking for, the ones LinkedIn never surfaced. But the more she read, the clearer the problem became: the loudest, best-funded voices were drowning out the real concerns, and the real value everyday people were getting from AI.

A new Substack friend, Amanda Rose Fadely, nudged her to start an interview series to give those quieter voices a stage. The series, AI, Software, & Wetware, is where the real shift happened, "moving from 'I want to share my own thoughts and ideas' to 'I'm going to amplify other people's voices.'"

No Excuses

The interview series lifted one woman at a time. A no-excuses list would do it all at once. So Karen pulled the names of the women AI writers she’d been reading and published them. The list was meant to do one simple thing: raise awareness.

Oh, but it was so much more.

“Wow, I’m not an ‘only’ here. I’m so happy to find these other women.”

Those reactions, she says, “highlighted an unmet need that the directory alone couldn’t fill,” the same “connection and mutual support” she’d spent years building through ERGs inside companies. So she kept going, growing it into what she calls “an ERG for independent women writers about AI.”

Karen didn't just give these writers a list. She gave them each other, and she hasn’t stopped since. Today it holds more than 700 women and non-binary writers.

Go find yourself on it. Or go put yourself there.

The Wikipedia Model

When Karen set out to publish her own book, she ran headfirst into how brutal the road actually is. Landing an agent is slow and rare without a massive following or a prestigious institution behind you. Self-publishing is a maze of cover designers, file formats, beta readers, and platforms, all of it on you. Quotes through a hybrid press ran twenty to forty thousand dollars, money she’d never recoup in sales.

“The writing is the easy part. It’s everything else about getting your book published that is hard.”

So she got her hands dirty and self-published her first book, Everyday Ethical AI, doing nearly all of it herself. Setting up the accounts, troubleshooting file formats, nudging the cover to match the exact page count. The glamorous life of a self-published author.

And somewhere in the middle of the grind a different idea took hold. If the money and the learning curve were the real gatekeepers, the busiest of women in tech would never publish at all.

It didn’t come from nowhere. She’d been invited to contribute a chapter to someone else’s collaborative book through a hybrid publisher, paid in, and watched it fall apart when they couldn’t fill the other chapters. She got her money back and walked away knowing exactly what not to do.

So she floated a collaborative book in the SheWritesAI community. Within days, fifteen women said yes. About half of them first-time authors. She also extended her reach beyond the US to women from other continents whose AI writing she admired.

They built it together. AI Everywhere, Vol. 1.

Volunteers covered design and layout, Design With Blessing handled the website, and one author, Cheyenne Dominguez | M(AI)VENS, chipped in a donation so participation could stay completely free. They call it the Wikipedia model.

SheWritesAI now takes donations and one-time tips from readers to keep future books and other community activities free for all.

Team Sport

Here’s the trade-off most people wouldn’t make.

Running the series means Karen’s own writing goes quiet. Her two newsletters, Everyday Ethical AI and 6 'P's in AI Pods (AI6P), have slowed. She hasn’t picked up a new paid subscriber in months. The deep analytical work she’s built for, and honestly misses, has given way to coordination and logistics. There’s money out of her own pocket too, ISBNs and proof copies and websites that add up fast.

She’s at peace with all of it though.

“I can help 24 or 30 women per volume get that extra visibility. That’s better for the world than me just improving my own.”

She’s always loved a team sport. Volleyball over tennis, she told me, an all-women’s league over co-ed any day, because the vibe is just different. Building a book together feels the same way: authors reviewing each other’s chapters, brainstorming together, posting selfies holding a printed book with their name on it.

Thirty years unseen. Now she does the seeing.

Glasses and Crutches

I asked Karen for her read on the “keep up or get left behind” rhetoric aimed at women. From her lens, the people who should be shaping AI, women, non-techies, anyone far outside the wealthy West, keep getting crowded out by whoever has the biggest platform and the deepest pockets. The cost isn’t abstract. It lands on real people right now.

She’s also done with the idea that guardrails kill progress. “Imagine the automotive world with no conventions about which side of the road to drive on, no traffic lights,” she says. Rules are the infrastructure that lets innovation happen safely, and regulation always lags behind, which means “so many people are already being harmed now.”

What she’s changed her mind about is closer to home. Since starting her interview series, she’s come to see AI as an accessibility accommodation, the same way someone leans on glasses, a hearing aid, or crutches.

“We would all be better off to extend more grace to others who make different decisions than we do. Their context is different. Their values, privileges, and tradeoffs are different.”

Save the judgment, she says, for the companies building on stolen data and exploited workers, not the woman just trying to get through her day.

She does have two warnings for the rest of us actually using these tools. First, have a backup plan. Losing access overnight, or a feature changing under your feet, is a real risk, and one she's written about. Keep building, just don't get caught flat-footed. Second, know who owns what you make. For the work that actually matters, check that the rights are really yours (she points to Sena Evren's piece on IP and generative AI).

The Second Shift

Karen has spent a career inside the gap, and built SheWritesAI in response. So when I asked what part of it people miss, she went somewhere I didn’t expect. The invisible workload at home.

In the SheWritesAI directory, the Parenting and Family Life category is one of the smallest. Not because women aren’t living it. Because almost no one has time to write about it.

“Learning AI on your own time is a lot harder when your second shift barely leaves you enough time to take a shower.”

It’s not a motivation problem. It’s a math problem. Women carry more of the unpaid load at home and more of the unglamorous “office chores” at work, which leaves less room to learn the very tool everyone’s insisting they pick up faster. She wrote a whole piece about it, Leaning In Is Not the Answer.

So what actually moves the needle? She doesn’t pretend to have the whole answer, but she keeps coming back to one line like a mantra: “no one can do everything, but we can all do something.” She points to the 3.5% rule, the research suggesting it only takes a small, committed share of people to create real change. You don’t have to reach everyone. Maybe 3.5% is enough.

This is such a great reminder for those of us community builders, especially on the days when we feel like we're not making enough of an impact.

Honors Math

When I asked Karen about imposter syndrome, she took me back to the start of college.

She’d come from a small rural high school. Top grades, top one percent SATs. She didn’t even apply to the Ivy League, sure she couldn’t get in or couldn’t cut it. Her guidance counselor tried to steer her out of engineering and into nursing. She won a full scholarship anyway, with a spot in the honors math track, then turned the honors track down, certain she couldn’t compete with kids from bigger, better-resourced schools.

She finished with top grades. And realized, too late, she’d have been just fine in honors math. Probably would have loved it.

The experience inoculated her, a little. It didn’t kill the self-doubt, but it gave her something to answer it with.

“Remember honors math? Yeah. Should have gone for it.”

Her advice to any woman sitting on something she hasn't let herself say in print, especially the newer writers still building their audience, is a Maggie Kuhn line she loves: "Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind, even if your voice shakes." Other people think about us far less than we fear. Say it anyway. This is what resonates, and it’s what draws the right people to you.

Amen to that.

Surprise

I asked Karen what would surprise people most about her. She didn’t reach for a hobby. She told me she’s older than people think.

It's the energy, she says. People take her drive and initiative and quietly assume she's younger than she is. She's not, and she has zero intention of slowing down.

“I am not ‘retiring’ and watching TV all day. I have stuff I want to DO to make a difference before I go.”

She’s already outlived her own father by decades. She knows the time is finite, and she’s decided exactly how to spend what’s left of it. If anything, she’s speeding up.

Which makes her even more of a badass. Every list, every book, every volunteer she’s pulled in, she’s building it all on a ticking clock, and doing so with real focus.

What’s Next

I asked Karen what the next five years look like, and she laughed, because so much could change. What she knows for now is concrete enough.

What started as Volume 2 of AI Everywhere has grown so big it's becoming three: volumes 2, 3, and 4, all aimed to launch on Ada Lovelace Day this October, the day that celebrates women in science and tech, named for the woman often called the first computer programmer. The next cohort is already bigger, more than thirty-five chapters confirmed, publishing in 2027 as volumes 5, 6, and 7. Audio versions might be next.

What she really wants is to slowly start to remove herself from the spotlight. Other women coordinating their own volumes, their names on the covers instead of hers, while she handles the tedious back-end publishing nobody else wants to touch. She talks about it through what she calls the parable of the choir.

“Vocalists drop in and out to breathe as they need to, and the note keeps going.”

Because life happens, and everyone needs to step back and breathe sometimes, including her. The point is to build something steady enough that the note never stops.

The choir already has names. Karen is quick to credit the volunteers holding She Writes AI up: Blessing Okpala, PhD, Farida Khalaf, Dr. Hollie C. White, Celeste Garcia, Federica Cascia and the anonymous layout volunteer who made the first book real.

Her own books, including the three she came to Substack to write, are still on the back burner.

She’ll get to them.

The Zoom Red Lip 💄

Karen doesn’t wear lipstick or much makeup at all, which I love.

Her one concession these days is playing around with Zoom’s new AI makeup filters. So if you catch her on a video call wearing a red lip, know this:

“It’s Zoom, not Maybelline.”

An AI ethicist whose red lip is literally rendered by AI. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

Passing The Torch

Mariam Vossough passed the torch to Karen Smiley and Dinah, and Dinah reinforced it, pointing me toward SheWritesAI and calling it “home to the woman I’d spotlight next.”

Now it’s Karen’s turn.

1. Rebecca Mbaya

2. Elena | AI Product Leader

I’m coming for ya!

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Thank you, Karen Smiley. We're all rooting for you ❤️.

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