“Owning AI: Your Authentic Instinct” with Deborah Pardes – January 18, 2026

Deborah Pardes spent the last 6 years listening to 110,000 conversations and engaging in over 30,000 of them. She’s passionate about working with writers to capture the trust and imaginations of their readers, by leveraging human conversations to support the uniqueness of their work. The talk will include some breakout sessions for participants to experiment with dialogue between each other with some prompts to collaborate and more deeply explore this concept. 

As VP of Stories & Voices at Swell, she has produced tens of thousands of conversations and helped design audio experiences that amplify human voices in an age of algorithmic noise. With these two lenses — the human voice in conversation and the human text in transformation — Deborah brings a deeply grounded perspective to her talk. She invites writers to reclaim the power of nuance, empathy and embodied voice in a world increasingly populated by synthetic words. In her session, you will learn how deeply human dialogue—not just what we say, but how we say it—can become both an act of resistance and a craft of connection.