Tech Conference Used AI to Fake Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI
There Are No Girls on the Internet
iHeartPodcasts
4.1 • 906 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The tech conference Devternity was canceled (not fake canceled, literally canceled) after allegations that the founder has been inventing fake women and catfishing on Instagram for years.
Bridget does a deep dive to get to the bottom of it, and what it says about default, dismissive attitudes about marginalized people in tech. There were real women the whole time! Why not invite one of them?!
A Tech Conference Listed Fake Speakers for Years: I Accidentally Noticed: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/devternity-fake-speakers/
Male Tech Conference Founder Is Behind Popular Woman Coding Influencer Account: https://www.404media.co/coding-unicorn-instagram-julia-kirsina-devternity/
Tech Conference Collapses After Organizer Admits to Making Fake ‘Auto-Generated’ Female Speaker: https://www.404media.co/devternity-fake-speakers-eduard-sizovs/
Eduards Sizovs’s full response thread: https://twitter.com/eduardsi/status/1728422017417032140
Here’s a collection of Julia through the years: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Fds4DgzU_Yem577sfGykauuNkltIq3ykZdZUd1EAUE/edit?usp=sharing
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.2 | I love a good tech scam. |
| 0:06.7 | Not the kind that hurts people, but the kind that reveals just how much smoke and mirrors holds the tech industry together. |
| 0:14.5 | Case in point in 2023, a tech conference called DevTurnity got caught faking female speakers with potentially fake |
| 0:23.6 | photos and fabricated bios. Now, at the time, it just seemed like a kind of embarrassing anomaly. |
| 0:30.7 | We covered it on the show, had a very good laugh, and pretty much moved on. But today, in |
| 0:36.0 | 26, with fake AI-generated personas flooding the internet and being used for |
| 0:42.2 | everything from marketing to election interference, it looks less like a one-off scandal and more |
| 0:47.9 | like a warning we should have heated. |
| 0:50.5 | So today, let's revisit the story of DevTurity and why fake personas are the tech problem |
| 0:56.3 | that nobody's taking seriously enough. |
| 1:00.1 | I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man. |
| 1:16.5 | There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. |
| 1:23.6 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 1:31.0 | So I feel like Christmas has kind of come a little bit early for me because Mike, |
| 1:38.0 | as you know, not only am I deeply fascinated by identity and technology, but also I am deeply fascinated by my other true love, which is scams. You know this about me. I love a good scam. |
| 1:43.3 | I love scam content, scam podcasts. |
| 1:45.7 | Give me all the scams. |
| 1:47.1 | I mean, don't scam me, but I want to be not involved in the scam and then hear about how |
| 1:52.5 | the scam unfolded so I can be like, oh, that's how they did it. |
| 1:55.3 | Yeah, your love of scams and catfishing is legendary, no doubt. |
... |
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