Stacey Abrams on writing, AI and democracy

Stacey Abrams has published more than a dozen books over the last 25 years. Those include thrillers, romance novels, children’s books, and political memoirs and manifestos. That would be a full career for most people, but Stacey Abrams seems to have more energy than most people.

While she has always been a writer, she has also been a tax attorney, a Georgia state lawmaker, the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and the first Black woman in U.S. history to become the gubernatorial nominee of a major political party.

Abrams has launched multiple nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies, with a longstanding focus on voter registration and voters’ rights. Her new book is “Coded Justice.” She spoke with “Think Out Loud” host Dave Miller in front of an audience at the 2025 Portland Book Festival.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to listen today to a conversation I had with the politician, activist and writer, Stacey Abrams. I talked to her in front of a raucous audience at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as part of the 2025 Portland Book Festival. Stacey Abrams has published 17 books over the last 25 years. The list includes thrillers, romance novels, children’s books, business books, and political memoirs and manifestos. It would be a full career for most people. But Stacey Abrams is not most people. She seems to have a lot more energy than most people because, while she has always been a writer, she has also always been something else: a tax attorney, a Georgia state lawmaker, the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, and the first Black woman in U.S. history to become the gubernatorial nominee of a major political party. She has also launched multiple nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies with a long standing focus on voter registration and voters’ rights. Her new book, a thriller all about AI and us, is called “Coded Justice.” Please join me in welcoming Stacey Abrams. Welcome to Portland.

Stacey Abrams: I may never leave.

Miller: I mentioned all those books, but I knew of you first as a politician and I think probably many people in the audience did – as a state lawmaker, as a gubernatorial candidate – before I knew you as a writer, but I have come to learn that writing came significantly first. You published your first novel soon after law school, am I right, that you’d written in law school?

Abrams: Mm-hm.

Miller: What do you remember about when that book came out?

Abrams: Do not try this at home. My third year of law school, I thought, “I really want to write a book, but I’m about to be a tax attorney and I probably won’t have any free time.” My ex-boyfriend – we were still friendly – he was a chemical physicist, and he sent me his dissertation. I’m like one of seven people who read it, and I found the topic fascinating. For a minute in my youth I thought I was going to be a physicist, too, so I read it and I was like, “Oh, this would make an amazing story.” So I called him and I’m like, he discovered this chemical called microzeolites, and they did these really cool things, and I said, “What if it could do this?” And he was like, “That’s absurd!” I’m like, this is why we broke up, you have no imagination!

So I wanted to write this novel about his discovery, but I was in the midst of thinking about environmental justice issues. Part of my construct was, how do you tell a story about environmental degradation and geopolitics in a way that people who aren’t invited into those conversations will want to be a part of it? I first was going to write it as a spy novel, but publishers in the late ‘90s did not publish spy novels by or about women, and certainly not by or about a Black woman. When I was roundly rejected a couple of times, I decided I would kill the same number of people, but I would make it a romance novel.

During my third year of law school, I’m writing this romance novel at the same time that I’m publishing an article on the unrelated business income tax exemption, which I’m sure all of you read. So I had this dual life of writing this romance novel that was going to sneak in a conversation about climate action and writing about the UBIT and the cognitive dissonance of our tax code. That’s what I was doing in my third year of law school.

Miller: OK, that was the writing of it. I have heard that you wrote stories going back to when you were in your teens or earlier, but this was your first published novel. Do you remember the day it came out?

Abrams: Oh yeah, so there’s this thing called Amazon that had just started. There are two things that happened. There was Amazon and there was this thing called Google. Google was concerning to me, because a friend of mine said, “Put your name in this search engine” – it took like two to three days for it to process, because this was before high-speed Wi-Fi – and it pulled up something I’d written as a teenager. I told you I’ve been writing for a while and I thought I was going to be a physicist, so I’d written this article on Mesopotamian astronomy that had been published by Georgia State University. Anyway, this is relevant because I’m about to publish this novel, and when I put my name into Google, it comes back with this article I’d written on Mesopotamian astronomy. I’m like, “What is this thing that can find something that nobody knows about?”

I was concerned about my first book coming out because I knew anything I wrote as a tax person would sit cheek by jowl with romance, and in the late ‘90s, we were not the most permissive society for both things to be true. I was both excited about the book, but concerned, because I wanted to have this very full story of who I was. You can write romance under a pseudonym, but you cannot write tax policy under a pen name.

What I remember about that day was I had to tell all my friends to buy the book, but to look for the name Selena Montgomery, because I needed them to buy it so I could sell another one but I also wanted them to know. Amazon had been selling some books by then, and it was a big deal if you got ranked by Amazon. So I sent an email to every person I’d ever met and said, “Please buy my book on this day,” – and for about 14 minutes, I was the number one bestselling book on Amazon.

Miller: Am I right, there are eight novels in that series?

Abrams: Yes.

Miller: All under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery. Although now you can buy them as Stacey Abrams, and it still says ‘Selena Montgomery’ on the cover. But for the Avery Keene series, and your new book is the third in that series, they’re under your name. Why?

Abrams: Again, I’m writing at the very beginning of my public career, so I was just starting out as a tax attorney, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the South, but I was a tax attorney in the South who was writing romance novels. I was never ashamed of it, never shy about it, my name’s in the book, my picture’s on the back of the book, but it was different. I was also trying to build a reputation, and no one was going to read romance by Alan Greenspan and no one was going to read tax policy by Nora Roberts, so I had to have these two different identities, but I was never ashamed of their intersection.

But by the time “While Justice Sleeps,” the first book in the Avery Keene series, came out, the gig was up. Everyone knew who I was and they knew about both sides of me. I was always happy to talk about it, but my opponents in my campaign thought it was salacious and they were trying to embarrass me. I’m not embarrassed. I like writing, I like storytelling. And I like for people to meet the characters and the ideas I have in the way that’s most comfortable to them. So if it’s romance, I do romance. If it’s children’s books, I do it that way. When it came time to write the Avery Keene series, I wanted to talk about geopolitical issues like a rogue president involved in international intrigue and a Supreme Court that was unable to control it.

Miller: Can you describe the heroine of this series, Avery Keene?

Abrams: Avery Keene was born as a story at the end around 2008, 2009. I’d written eight of my Selena Montgomery novels, there’s three – they’re not intersecting, but three different series – and I wanted to try my hand at a legal thriller. A dear friend of mine, if you read the Avery Keene series, her name is Teresa Wynn Roseborough, she was the first Black woman to be a partner at a major law firm in Atlanta. She took really good care of me, especially as we realized I was not cut out to be a corporate lawyer.

She and I were having lunch because I’d begun what my mom calls my trajectory of downward economic mobility. I left my really good job at the law firm to go and work for the city of Atlanta, and it was not a pay increase, so Teresa would still feed me. And we were having lunch one day and she said, have you ever thought about the fact that the Constitution allows you to remove a president or a Congressional member for different reasons, but you can only remove a federal judge for high crimes, misdemeanors, or death? And that might be a problem.

So I started thinking, what does that look like? Again, this is 2008, 2009, it’s around the time of Terri Schiavo, and I thought, what if a Supreme Court Justice fell into a persistent vegetative state and that Justice was the swing vote on the court – what would happen? And I needed a heroine who could navigate the ensuing controversy. But I wanted someone who had the least amount of power possible, but had enough proximity to be a plausible character, and that was a law clerk for a Supreme Court justice. Avery really was born of my constant interrogation of, what does it mean to have responsibility but no authority?

Because that’s where most of us find ourselves. We have things that we think need to happen, but we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the authority, we don’t have the access, but we still know something needs to happen. Avery really is for me the embodiment of this tension because the natural answer is to say, “Well, if I don’t have the authority to fix it, I’m just gonna not do it.”

I wanted her to have to decide to take on this responsibility, and to decide to figure out what her boss – the Supreme Court justice who’s in the coma – what he was trying to tell her, and once she figured that out, she got a couple more books.

Miller: One of the things I really appreciate about the character and the way you set up these books is that, in a sense, they’re legal thrillers and they’re like detective novels too. She goes from being a law clerk to a lawyer at a firm, but she doesn’t solve these alone. I’m used to detective novels having a kind of genius who’s ideally always one step ahead of the reader, but she has a bunch of friends who she relies on. A friend who’s a doctor, or a cybersecurity expert who’s her boyfriend, or a fellow lawyer who can track down money that wants to remain hidden. Why have a whole team?

Abrams: I am the second of six children. I grew up with teammates. I think my parents were aiming for a basketball team. I kid you not, someone in the audience actually met one of my sisters. My older sister is an anthropologist who became a professor. I do stuff. Leslie is a lawyer. Andrea is an anthropologist and a professor. Leslie is a judge. Richard was a social worker who now is a television producer. Walter is figuring it out, but he’s very smart. Walter has had some challenges with the justice system. I’ve talked about him, he’s been in and out of the carceral system, but he’s also one of the sweetest, smartest people I’ve known, but he grapples with mental health challenges. Then my youngest sister, Jeanine, is a molecular systematist, a microbiologist who now runs a nonprofit.

I grew up with an array of people who had these multi-talents, and our mom was a reference librarian before she became a pastor, and our father was a shipyard worker who tried everything. I grew up with this very strong belief that you never go alone. I was about 15 before I realized Snickers had peanuts in it because I had always had to share everything. So for me, Avery having a team is natural. People who are sui generis and fiercely independent, congratulations. But very few things get done that way.

I wanted her to not just have a team that she could rely on, but as we explore most, I think directly in code of justice, I wanted to have people who argue with her. Often the conversations I’m employing Avery to push forward, they’re conversations that we need to have, but we can’t all have the same opinion. I want her to be tested against people that she can’t dismiss because they’re not as smart as she is. She’s smart in a really unique and extraordinary way, but they’re smart too, and I want her to feel like she’s arguing with peers but also learning from them.

That’s how I feel about my siblings, they all help me with my books, for no pay. I send them my stuff like, tell me what works, tell me what doesn’t. For me, it’s a natural way to build community and a natural way to do things. You don’t do it by yourself. If you are by yourself, there’s probably a reason. And you should ask, “Why doesn’t anybody else want to do this with me?” Avery really is how I think about how you navigate tough questions. You don’t go alone, you have to have someone who’s starting it, but her job is to be the leader, but never to be the only.

Miller: Let’s turn to the new book. It’s about a lot of things, but at the heart of it, it is about AI, about the promise of it, and that’s a real thing. I really appreciate about the book, is that deeply embedded in the book is some hope that it could be a force for good. Also, it’s a thriller, and there are deep questions about whether – this is not a spoiler because this comes from the first chapter – whether AI is a murderer. So the promise and perils of AI.

Was there a specific moment when you said, “I want to do this,” or was it just because AI is an inescapable technology that we’re all, in various ways, having to grapple with right now?

Abrams: It’s the intersection of a few things. I had a book that was due and I’ve tried to use the Avery Keene stories to tackle big constructs that affect us all, but most of us don’t think that it’s for us to know or to investigate too deeply. When I wrote “While Justice Sleeps,” in 2009, 2010, so at the very advent of CRISPR, but also during the war on terror, and I was exploring the conversation of targeting of nation-states using your genetics to decide your values, your humanity.

If you haven’t read “While Justice Sleeps,” it really explores a conversation about biogenetics warfare, and what roles we should play in figuring out who is worthy of protection. The second book, “Rogue Justice,” looks at cryptocurrency, the FISA Court, and the fact that our electrical grid is a joke, and that we have lights every day is a miracle.I know way too much about the electric grid. So for this one, I was trying to think about, what questions were we not asking?

At the same time, I was deeply involved in the fight to save DEI. DEI, as you know from the Students for Fair Admissions case in 2023, came under attack. I was listening to people deriding this notion without understanding that when it’s not a boring HR seminar, DEI, especially if you’re talking to those who are attacking it, they understand that DEI describes the entire architecture of American law that provides equal protection under the law. That’s what it is. But it had been relegated to either a joke, or worse, it was seen as the enemy of merit, which is a false flag operation that we have fallen for hook, line and sinker.

So there was that. My parents lived with me for about four years. I invited them to stay for a couple of weeks, and they just never went home. I have a niece that my parents have raised since she was five days old. She was 14 when she and my parents moved in with me. There is nothing more terrifying than having a teenager who knows more than you do about a topic. And she knew about AI. And I did not like that.

She came home from school one day and she was doing something with AI and I’m like, “How is that not cheating?” And she was like, “Oh, Stacey, this isn’t cheating because of this and this.” And I realized I could not argue with her, and not being able to argue with a 16 year old is just wrong. So I’m like, I need to understand AI. The more I thought about AI and DEI, I started reading Joy Buolamwini’'s “Unmasking AI,” and Mustafa Suleyman’s “The Coming Wave,” and I wanted to understand how to talk about AI, this incredibly pervasive technology that has a population of young people for whom it is native. They have no questions that AI should exist. I’m Gen X, so I’m still trying to figure out how, and she’s just trying to figure out what she should do with it.

That generational divide matters, and then you layer on top of it how pervasive it has become in our lives and it’s one of the things I want to investigate. We think of AI in the current moment as chatGPT, but it is embedded into almost every facet of our modern lived experience, and most of us don’t know it or don’t know quite how it works. It also seems so complicated that we exempt ourselves from investigating it. No one’s gonna sit down and read “Four Battlegrounds,” more than likely. I mean, you should, it’s a good book, but most of us aren’t going to do the deep investigation. So for me, this book was about, how do I raise the conversation of AI? How do I do my own deep dive and then translate it so that more people, if not feel like experts, feel comfortable asking questions? That was the genesis of the book.

Miller: To tie those two bits together, as a way to explain how you want to explore both DEI now and AI, can you describe the healthcare company that Avery Keene is hired to investigate?

Abrams: Avery is invited in because this company is about to go public – not that you guys here in Portland know anything about companies going public and making billions of dollars. This company is about to go public, and as you’ve mentioned at the very beginning, someone dies, and the question is who or what killed him? The head of the company, Rafe Diaz, knows that if it becomes a public conversation, he could lose billions of dollars. Under the law, if you have a lawyer checking it out for you under certain guises, then anything that lawyer finds out is privileged. So he brings Avery in, and Avery brings in her team.

Rafe is a retired army medic who is trying to solve veterans’ healthcare. I picked veterans because they are the most diverse, singular unit in our American story. The first part of the government to intentionally not just desegregate, but to integrate. When you think about DEI, there’s no better example of what DEI means than looking at our armed forces. There’s nothing more pernicious and consistently failing than our healthcare to our veterans. I wanted to use a very sympathetic community, a very understandable failure, a very promising solution driven by AI, to bring together all of these conversations, and then somebody has to die.

Miller: One of the pleasures in the book is reading the interactions that various characters have with various chatbots, for lack of a better word. There are a couple of different characters that have different roles within this healthcare AI company, but I don’t remember, certainly since ChatGPT and since in the current age of AI’s, reading characters quite like the ones you’ve created. They’re obsequious at times, which I think I am used to, and weirdly congratulatory, but they’re also petulant and annoying and almost mean. What was it like to write those characters?

Abrams: It was fun. If you do a deep dive into the training of AI models, Claude for Anthropic or chatGPT, or the two weeks when Grok became a Nazi, like, it happens. What happens is that these models are trained on our interactions, on our engagements, and we tend to think about them in a sort of anthropomorphized way, as though they were born like Venus, but they were programmed by someone and they were deployed and are retrained over and over again.

Recently, Claude – and I appreciate the fact that Anthropic keeps telling us about this – Claude tried to blackmail someone. Grok, as we saw a few months ago, became a Nazi and said that, because of how it was trained on Twitter chats, it basically produced answers that were very driven by Nazi ideology.

I think for me it was, if you’re trying to train a model that has to interact, there’s Milo, who is the chatbot that actually helps run the veterans’ clinic, and then Kawak, who’s sort of the mastermind who manages all of the interactions, and then there are Yax and Keh who are the robotic manifestations.

How do you create distinctions, for me, that were representative of the different AI models that are out there right now? Because the way OpenAI and Sam Altman thinks about training a model is different than how Meta thinks about training a model, which is different than how Anthropic approaches it, which is different from how xAI thinks about it. But those are the four that are making all these decisions about how we engage AI. So for me it was, how do you have conversations that are representative of not just what the models sound like, but what their progenitors sound like and think about and how they engage the world? If you ever listen to those various creators and those various businessmen talk about their role, you will notice, I think, a bit of a through-line in the kind of response that you can then track back to the chatbots that they’ve created.

Miller: I take your point about the danger of anthropomorphizing these creations that are the result of machine learning and the sucking in of just unimaginable amounts of us, of the digital detritus we’ve that we’ve created and given them. They eat it and somehow they spit stuff out and it’s a mistake to see them as human when they spit that stuff out. But I still wondered as I was reading the book what it was like for you as a novelist to write this, because I feel like it would be hard as a novelist not to feel them as sentient in some way. Did you start to feel that? Did AI feel different to you because you had characters?

Abrams: Absolutely, and I think that’s part of what happens with our current engagement. I wanted those characters to feel like characters. I wanted them to hold the kind of effect – we get mad at our cars, some of us name them – so anthropomorphizing is how we engage technology so that we can understand our reliance on that technology. It’s not an uncommon tendency. It’s dangerous, though, when we divorce the technology from the progenitor. So for me, in writing the characters, I wanted us to feel the possibility of those characters.

I write character sketches for my major characters. I did character sketches of Milo and Cowik, because how those models are trained, how machine learning works, what we program this technology to do, matters and it was why the DEI frame was so important. Because, if you think about, exactly what you just said, Dave, it’s trained on all of this information. But if that information isn’t informed by understanding the intersectionality of that data, it is dangerous.

I use it as an example, this came from my own family experience, my father had prostate cancer. He went into remission, and then he had a second bout, but the doctor, who was a perfectly lovely man – my parents were in Mississippi, which is where I grew up – had not learned that Black men have different PSA levels than white men do when it comes to a recurrence of prostate cancer, and he missed it. It took my mom demanding a separate set of tests for them to identify that my dad’s prostate cancer had not only returned but it had metastasized.

So when you hear the president of the United States demand that AI models not be trained on DEI, that means not being trained on data that understands the distinction between racial groups and gender identity and gender issues when we’re informing what is now going to control the deployment of our healthcare. It’s important to me for us to understand the supposed humanity of the AI, but it was also important for me to make sure that we understood that it wasn’t the AI making the decisions, it was how the AI was trained that helped make the decisions, and that even the best intentions doesn’t determine the best outcome.

Miller: I asked her if writing fiction has made her think any differently about policy.

Abrams: The reason I write across genres is that I think storytelling is the nature of governance. You have to have a vision, you have to believe there’s a story to be told about who we are, who we intend to be, and how we got here. I try to use different genres to explore those stories, but ultimately every policy you write is a story that you’re telling, too. You’re saying, this is the outcome I think we should get here. Here’s the conclusion we’re trying to draw, and here’s the way we’re gonna get there. That’s what a story is, it’s to create a conflict, complicate the conflict, and then resolve the conflict.

If you’re writing good policy, you can articulate what the problem is, you can explain why it’s a problem, and now here’s your prescription of how you solve it. Anytime you can’t lay those things out, you probably shouldn’t pass that law. And anyone who can’t tell you how they got there should not be the person in charge of solving the problem.

Miller: Let’s follow that. First of all, are there any laws right now in our country governing AI?

Abrams: Very few, and there is this moment in the book where that question is raised and the answer, it was a really short chapter. But it also is why we should be deeply terrified when we hear policymakers say, let’s have a 10-year moratorium on any regulation of this technology that is literally embedded in your toaster. Because that’s what they’re talking about when they say when, for a brief shining moment during the debate over the MAGA bill, one of the few moments I agreed with the senator from Tennessee was when she said, that’s a bad idea to strip state and local governments of the ability to put in place privacy laws and data laws, and to question these four men who are making decisions about technologies that control or are being embedded in every facet of our lives.

Luckily, what the answer was, it got stripped out of the bill, but we’ve got to watch because they’re gonna try again, and so we should be asking our state and local lawmakers, how are you dealing with this?

I’ll give you one quick example. There was a moment where, and I’m gonna butcher the story, there was public housing that was going to use facial recognition in lieu of keys, because people were getting locked out and the locksmith was tired of coming out there and it was supposed to be a smart building. Well, the problem is facial recognition technology routinely fails for darker skinned people. Then the databases for facial recognition are problematic because we don’t have laws about where that data can be sold, traded, or used.

Which means someone could come to visit their cousin and their image could be uploaded into a database and then sent through NCIC, which is the National Criminal Information Center, and misconstrued and used to deny someone of their liberty because they got wrongly tagged as someone who had a warrant out. All because they came to visit their cousin. Without guardrails, there’s nothing currently in American law that says that that’s illegal. And there’s no recourse for the man who gets arrested and spends six months in jail waiting for a hearing.

But without the resources to hire a technologist to go back and prove that it was facial recognition software that failed that led to their false incarceration, because in the United States, it happens that people get falsely convicted and incarcerated on bad information. We don’t have laws that control any of that right now. There are states like California and New York that are starting. I think Oregon has had some conversations, but we should be asking, because right now we do not have good laws, and we have not thought about all of, not just the immediate implications, but the follow-on implications, for what it means to have this technology that touches everything but is controlled by no one that we know. And that can change the course of your life.

Miller: I’m glad you brought that example, because, as you were getting to at the end there, it shows just how complicated this is and how many different realms of law we’re talking about. About who owns it, about how these systems were trained, about the repercussions of their use.

Where would you want to start, in terms of regulation and for maybe a sharper way to put it, Europe is ahead of us right now. How much of what Europe has done would you like to see, and what else would you like to see?

Abrams: I would look at Europe. I’d also look at Kenya. Kenya regulates how data is scraped. One of the first questions is, what do they know about us? What data are they gathering from us? How are they getting that data?

I know almost no one reads the fine print of the end-use agreement when you’re downloading that really, really important app that’s gonna let you watch TV for free.

Miller: Do you read that?

Abrams: I do.

Miller: Every word?

Abrams: I don’t drive as much anymore, but I used to annoy Hertz. I read that. I read everything.

Miller: You’re a tax lawyer.

Abrams: I’m also paranoid. I mean, thoughtfully paranoid, but paranoid. Yeah, I read them all because they have to tell you what they’re going to do, or they tell you they’re not going to tell you. You should look because if you are using almost every current chatbot, they are using your answers to train their models. Meaning they are taking your private thoughts to train the models, but you don’t know if they’re doing it in the aggregate or disaggregate.

For example, Otter says that if you use Otter.Ai, Otter says that they disaggregate the data, meaning that they can’t directly use your conversation. OK, are you sure? At least they give you a cause of action if it turns out that your confession gets used against you, but chatGPT doesn’t give you that. We have to know what’s being done, and we can make an informed decision and decide, this convenience to me is more important.

But let me just remind folks, if you’d asked almost anybody in this room a decade ago, would you give up your fingerprint to make things more convenient? Almost everyone would say no. Raise your hand if you use TSA. We have all agreed to give biometric data so we don’t have to stand in line for 15 minutes. That’s what the TSA lines are. We blithely trade our privacy for convenience, and the more we do that without interrogating the consequence, the harder and harder it will be to claw it back.

Miller: But that’s a great example of putting the onus on us, as opposed to having it be on the companies ahead of time.

Abrams: Yes.

Miller: Right? So the solution has to be upstream.

Abrams: I aggressively agree with you. I think that we should be regulating AI. I think what Europe is doing is smart. I don’t think they’ve gone far enough. We haven’t even started in earnest. One of the organizations I created is called Deliver the American Dream, it’s part of our DEI coalition. The coalition is called American Pride Rises and we have Defending American Values Coalition which looks at how we talk about DEI and how we build coalitions, and in fact they’ll be here next week doing a conference on DEI here in Portland.

But then the corollary is Deliver the American Dream, where we do state legislation, and one of our big pushes next year will be AI legislation. How do we start to have these conversations at the state and local level? Because Congress is not going to take action, we have to talk to you, and you’re absolutely right, your school board should have a rule about how the data they gather from children can be used. Your city council, your county commission, because there’s a company that’s gonna come and offer to buy that data and say they’re going to disaggregate it. They are buying your data and you don’t know what they’re going to use it to do.

Miller: Or police departments or cities…

Abrams: Or Palantir, yeah, we’ve got all of these entities. You hear about the rise of gold and the fact that people are buying gold again. Data is the most valuable currency in the world, and you are the only ones who own it. But because we are so disaggregated, I’m sorry for using the same words over and over again, but because we’re so diffuse, they want us to have to individually make these choices. You’re absolutely right, society does not work if every person has to be an expert in everything. That is why we have government, that is why we have regulation.

We don’t want to constrain innovation, but asking questions is not a constraint on innovation. It is a mechanism to ensure that that innovation does not outstrip the humanity of the users. That’s our responsibility.

Miller: I wanna go back to the healthcare AI company that you put at the center of the novel, because, importantly, you chose an inarguably noble goal for this company. It’s not some frivolous moneymaker that they’re trying to… if we take them at their word – and as a reader I felt like I was supposed to take the company CEO at his word – that he really does care about the health of veterans and long standing health inequities and disparities and he thinks he has a way to fix that.

It turns out things are way more complicated, and there are gigantic problems with the model that we won’t get into more here, but that’s a long preamble to say after talking about the perils of AI, what do you see as the promise of it? If we can solve some of the gigantic regulatory issues, what are your hopes for what AI could give us?

Abrams: AI is an amazing tool. It has the most promise of any modern tool that we’ve developed, but tools can be used to build or destroy. What I want us to think about is, how are these tools being used? And if you want to understand how a tool is being used, you have to look at the maker. You have to look at the seller, and you have to look at the buyer. We have to look at the engineers who are developing those tools. You have to look at the companies and the owners of those companies who are very happy to tell you they are the owners of those companies. What are they doing with those tools? And then who are they selling those tools to? Who’s buying it, and what are they using it for?

And your point about nobility is perfectly right. If you saw “Oppenheimer,” nobility is never an excuse. It might be the intent, but you cannot control a tool once it’s been constructed. The noble intention behind it does not diminish the devastation that can follow. What I want us to do is to not be so wowed by what it can do that we ignore what can then follow.

I also don’t want us to focus so much on Claude and ChatGPT and Grok and all of the names that we forget the people, because it’s the people, especially those who are making billions and now trillions of dollars, that we should be paying attention to, because you don’t make that much money on nobility. Eventually you’re going to have to make decisions about the ignoble or the less-than noble or just the remarkably pedestrian that can be the most dangerous outcome. I don’t want us to leave “Coded Justice” being afraid of AI. I want us to be cautious of what AI is capable of, and I want us to be very intentional about demanding answers from and understanding of those who are behind AI. It’s like being mad at the monkeys in “Wicked,” and not paying attention to the wizards.

Miller: We have about 10 minutes left, and I want to turn to…

Abrams: Thank you for almost clapping for that. There was someone out there who was really hoping y’all were gonna clap for that monkey, man. I wanted to acknowledge that.

Miller: I just want to turn to another huge issue that you have spent your career working on. Voting rights, one of the centerpieces of your political and policy work. Just to start with a broad general question, what is at stake right now?

Abrams: Democracy. My intention behind fighting for voting rights and democracy has never been about the theoretical construct. It’s a lived decision based on growing up in communities where nobody cared what we wanted. And the only methodology for any real power was the right to vote. That is why it was denied for so many years, to so many people. In a democracy, you are entitled to have a voice. You are not entitled to a victory, but you’re entitled to a voice, and I believe so deeply in making certain that every person, by virtue of your citizenship, gets to have that voice. That’s the beginning.

But what we face right now is that, while we have long been arguing over the kind of democracy we would have, how representative it would be, how constrained it would be, we are now having an argument over democracy versus authoritarianism. Those are two very different systems, and we are in the midst of an authoritarian regime. We are in competitive authoritarianism right now, and it is deeply, deeply naive to think that we are still operating in a full democracy. We are not.

We have an authoritarian regime that is, over time, very quickly consolidating its power. And it has happened over and over again. There are 10 steps from democracy to autocracy, and we have taken every single one of those steps, and if you go to 10stepscampaign.org, I can tell you all about them. You all are ground zero for one of those steps. There’s step four, which is you break democracy and you break government so it doesn’t work, because autocracy wins, authoritarianism wins when people no longer believe that democracy is worth the effort. You eliminate SNAP benefits and you strip away healthcare and you make it harder and harder for government to do its job so that people say, a pox on all your houses, just solve my problem, and if it takes an authoritarian to do that, I’ll take it.

But you also have the normalization of state violence, which often begins with military occupation, with paramilitary, with secret police, and there is no universe in which it should be a normal thing that you have the National Guard or ICE roaming the streets and we are not talking about it every single day.

It’s not right.

But if there are 10 steps to authoritarianism and autocracy, there are 10 steps to freedom and power, and those 10 steps take a lot longer than the 10 steps it takes to lose it. Part of my mission is for us to understand that while we are under attack, and our democracy is under attack, voting rights are part of how we gain it back. The right to vote is the exercise of our fundamental authority, but we cannot use it if we don’t do the other things in between. My work right now, and it’s embedded in “Code of Justice,” and every platform I can get to, I need us to understand that yes, we are losing our democracy, but we can get it back, but it is not a given.

What happens when democracy starts to erode is that we start to forget why we had it in the first place. My mission, my work, my commitment is always, how do we remember the 10 things we have done every other time this has happened, because it’s happened here before. We called it Jim Crow in the South. We called it the Civil War. We called it the Revolutionary War. This has happened before, and so our job is to remember that we have the power to preserve and create, and that’s got to be the work we do.

Miller: How do you decide the best way personally to leverage the power, the influence that you have?

Abrams: I’m laughing because I don’t know.

Miller: You have a podcast, you write books, you speak. I guess I’m just wondering, and this is a question about tactics, I suppose, and also there are only so many hours in the day. Running for office is a choice you’ve made in the past. You’ve said recently that maybe it’ll happen in the future. You’re not doing it right now. I’m just curious how you think about the best use of your own energy?

Abrams: I was laughing at the influence part.

Miller: I appreciate the modesty, but you do have influence.

Abrams: I do, I do. I was not being self-deprecating. What I am saying is, I don’t know quite what it is. I write lots of books. Most people have no idea. I do work in democracy and a lot of people don’t know. So for me it is, I don’t know what my influence is, so I just try to use every lever at my disposal to get to as many people as I can.

I write children’s books. My most recent children’s book was called “Stacey Speaks Up” about children’s hunger. I wrote that, it came out in December. I didn’t anticipate that there would be a present example of why that was important, but the whole goal of the book was to talk to children about the importance of empathy and advocacy. I wrote “Code of Justice” last year, before Grok went crazy, but I wrote it because I thought that AI was going to be an important part of what we would need to navigate, and I wanted people to understand it.

Here’s how I think about it. My mantra, if you listen to my podcast, it’s called “Assembly Required.” At the end of every episode, we say, “Be curious, solve problems, do good.” That’s my tactical approach. I am curious about the things that are happening, and that constant curiosity means I end up in a lot of different spaces. I try to solve problems. I do not believe in simple diagnosis.

When I was a kid, I was about 14 and my mom pulled me aside because she was a little irritated with me and she said, you know, you don’t want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none. What she meant was, pick something and just focus on it. What I heard was, “Try everything.”

Miller: Be a master of all.

Abrams: I’ve been trying. I’m like, OK, I’m gonna just master everything. So I’ve tried lots of stuff and I’ve refused to be constrained by what I’m supposed to do because I don’t know what that is. If I have a capacity, part of my way of solving problems is figure out what the right tool is. If there’s a toolbox sitting there, I’m not gonna say I’m only allowed to use a wrench. I’m gonna figure out how all of those tools work, which tools I’m good at using. I’m gonna find other people who can use the other tools that I don’t know how to use, and I’m gonna try to solve the problem.

That’s why I create a lot of organizations, that’s why I do a lot of different things. I’m a good writer, so I write stories. I’m a pretty good speaker, so I talk. I was effective in politics, so when I stand for office, when it works, I use that. And when it doesn’t work, I don’t stop doing the work. I just find another tool that lets me get there, because ultimately the mission is to do good.

For me, that’s the measure of how I decide is, if I do those first two things, will the ultimate end be that I’m doing good? That’s really how I decide if this is worth my time, because if I’m curious and if I try to solve this problem, will I be able to do good with it? And if I can, I’m gonna try.

Miller: Stacey Abrams, thank you very much.

“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.