Nonprofit AI: Where do you get your information about AI?

Carolyn Woodard covers a question worth asking before your nonprofit makes any decision about AI: where is your information about AI coming from, and what does that source need from you? As a consumer you have had roughly a billion dollars of advertising aimed at getting you to adopt AI. That does not make what you are hearing wrong, but it does mean the messengers deserve a look.

This episode maps the sources you are hearing from, including AI companies, funders and foundations, vendors and IT providers like Community IT, environmentally engaged nonprofits, and your peers in the sector. Each has a legitimate reason to be in this conversation, and each has a tilt. 

Carolyn then works through two recent articles that complicate the optimistic story: a Nonprofit Quarterly critique of the third wave of tech giving, and reporting on how fossil fuel companies are using AI to become more efficient in finding, extracting, and selling more fuel, adding un-tracked costs to the equation of AI harms and benefits. 

This episode covers:

• Why the third wave of tech philanthropy can't be expected to repair what the extraction phase created, since the harm has already happened and the decision makers remain geographically and institutionally separated from the communities bearing the costs.
• Why data centers have become a fulcrum in the public conversation, galvanizing opposition across the political spectrum in places like Texas in a way that a decade of theoretical pieces about machine intelligence never did.
• The self-reinforcing loop between AI and fossil fuels: Chevron building a Texas gas plant to power Microsoft data centers that run the AI helping Chevron pull out and sell more fossil fuel.
• Why AI literacy  matters more than ever for nonprofit organizations - including those that have decided not to adopt AI at all.
• Three questions to bring to any source of AI information: who paid for this, what do they sell, and what is this source not going to tell me?
• Why designating an AI owner, a person or small committee who tames the fire hose of information, is worth doing whether or not your organization is adopting AI.

Resources Mentioned:

• AI Use Case Library, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation
• Can Tech Philanthropy Solve What Tech Extraction Creates? Michelle Flores Vryn, Nonprofit Quarterly
• The third wave of American philanthropy, Nan Ransohoff, Substack
• AI Could Help Fossil Fuel Companies Create More Emissions, WIRED
• AI-driven productivity gains enable more CO2 emissions than they avoid in a global energy-economy model, Alpine et al., npj Climate Action
• AI Applications for Oil and Gas Companies Worsen Climate Pollution, Inside Climate News

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Thanks for listening. 

Transcript

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Carolyn Woodard 0:22

Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Nonprofit AI check-in midweek on Tuesdays. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm your host. I'm not an AI expert. I am just fascinated by what is happening right now in the world of AI, how it interacts with nonprofits, how nonprofits are interacting with AI. And I hope every week to bring you just a news story, some research, some opinions, and uh try to keep having this open conversation about what is AI, how are nonprofits reacting to it in this moment.

Carolyn Woodard 1:01

I was at a conference uh earlier this year, and one of the speakers said that no matter what you think about AI or you think you think about AI, every time you think about AI, remember you've had about a billion dollars of advertising aimed at you as a consumer to get you to consume AI.

Carolyn Woodard 1:23

So there's both the question of should we use AI, how do nonprofits use AI, what feels right, what can we do with AI, what are the enormous benefits that we can get from it for the communities we care about and with the communities we care about, but also we know there are great harms that are happening and that have happened with AI and the method of extraction, the places the data centers are cited. So it is not a benefit without a very large cost.

Carolyn Woodard 1:56

So why does it feel urgent right now to adopt AI and start using it? If you have FOMO, you're not alone. If you're feeling pressure to be using AI, if you are using AI to write grant proposals or to make your work more efficient, to uh build your capacity because you're understaffed and under-resourced as a nonprofit. If you are thinking about ways that AI could fundamentally change how your nonprofit does what you do, like what you do, uh than just productivity, like actually your mission, how you could use AI for that.

Carolyn Woodard 2:34

I shared last week this uh amazing uh library of use cases of nonprofits that's put up by the McGovern Foundation. And I'll share another link to that in the show notes to this episode. Um, so this is not an anti-AI episode. It's I want to talk a little bit more and think a little bit more about considering the source of the information you are getting about AI and how you could use it, should be using it.

Carolyn Woodard 3:03

And of course, uh self-reflection, uh, this podcast and community IT also are one of the sources you're getting your data and information from. We have a policy toward our clients, which is that, you know, we don't force AI on them. We respond, we partner with our clients. So we respond to their questions, concerns, uh, projects that they want to do. We have several clients who are very intentionally implementing AI, choosing tools, rolling out AI literacy for their staff, uh, being very careful about the cybersecurity, you know, doing evaluations and assessments and treating AI as they would any other tech project. Like if you got a new CRM, you would do a lot of this evaluation and assessment and change management. Um, so there we think that is a really good way to be looking at it.

Carolyn Woodard 3:56

We know that not every nonprofit can uh has the capacity to or is kind of in the tech space to be able to be really intentional about AI, which is what we would recommend. But if you can't, uh we know that there are a lot of nonprofits that are, you know, just using tools. And so we try to give our best advice and suggestions on how to use the tools as securely as possible, um, how to use your time and the resources that are available to you to use AI in thoughtful ways.

Carolyn Woodard 4:33

And, you know, we know we have clients that don't want to use AI at all. There are nonprofits out there that don't want to have anything to do with it. And I never want to imply like that's a wrong choice. Those are the right choices for you if that's where you are. You know, in this podcast, I try to, you know, we're talking about AI. So if you're already in the zone where you're like thinking about it, wondering about it, adopting it, want to do it better, try to have lots of resources for you on that.

Carolyn Woodard 5:01

And so in this episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about um, you know, different messengers that you're hearing from.

Carolyn Woodard 5:07

Of course, you're hearing from the AI companies themselves. They have billion-dollar, you know, marketing budgets to uh talk about how great it is. I was watching a major league baseball game the other day, and they're, you know, Google AI is a big uh had their ads all over it. So, you know, they're definitely reaching out through the means that they can, the marketing they can.

Carolyn Woodard 5:31

You also are hearing, I'm sure, from funders and foundations. I mean, I think a lot of foundations themselves are kind of feeling their way with what how they're going to use AI and what they want to do with it. In my experience, it's not true that every foundation has more money than every nonprofit, but in general, a lot of foundations have a different, you know, just different budget and a different uh approach and philosophy around their budget and around technology adoption.

Carolyn Woodard 6:01

So a lot of foundations are being more deliberative about AI adoption. A lot of them are not. They are also just have staff who are using uh tools willy-nilly and um, you know, trying to rein that in after the fact is more difficult. So if you're a foundation foundation out there listening to this, um, you know, being intentional is what we recommend. We have a lot of resources on our website around that.

Carolyn Woodard 6:28

And then you also, if you're listening to this podcast and thinking about AI, you're also hearing from vendors, uh, consultants, IT service providers like us. And it's, you know, we're responding to what's going on in the sector and to, you know, I just think about two, three years ago, going to conferences, looking online, you know, reading LinkedIn articles and opinion pieces. Very little was about AI. And if it was, it was geared toward tech heads who were really interested in it, early adopters. Um, there were some conferences that were talking about AI, but there were a lot of conferences where there might be one session or one meetup about AI. And if you look at your conferences and uh LinkedIn this year, it's like there might be one session that's not about AI. It's really just flipped. So

Carolyn Woodard 7:21

I think a lot of vendors and consultants and IT providers uh like Community IT are trying to respond to this flood of vendors, AI companies, and you know, foundation grant money that's out there, nonprofits that are interested in it and wondering how to do it as well as they can. And so we try to be, you know, a resource for that.

Carolyn Woodard 7:44

And then, like I said, conferences, webinars, uh, LinkedIn, online, you Reddit, you're seeing a lot about AI. And you may be seeing it from boosters, people who are really excited about it. And like I said, the kind of tech heads, early adopters who are just, you know, want to share what they've learned about it with people who are adopting it now. Um, you'll also hear from people who are really against AI and you know, more power to them. And I think those are voices that we need to listen to. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about a couple of stories today about that skepticism.

Carolyn Woodard 8:20

Of course, in the nonprofit sector, we listen to each other. So we're hearing from other nonprofits and our peers and our colleagues. And in the sector at large, we worry about the environment, we worry about systemic power, we worry about and think about systemic um issues of you know racism and um use of our commodities and resources uh for the few instead of for the many. So, you know, nonprofits, though, that are environmentally focused and foundations that support environmental projects, of course, are very skeptical, have been skeptical from very early on.

Carolyn Woodard 9:06

Even nonprofits that aren't directly working on environment, also maybe skeptical in general, uh, nonprofits working in workforce development, uh, communities that may be targeted for data center placement.

Carolyn Woodard 9:18

I just read an article a couple weeks ago about native communities and tribal lands and how, as there is pushback on citing data centers in wealthy developments, um, the corporations are looking for places that they could put those data centers that they'll get, you know, there will be less ability to oppose them. And so those might be in rural areas, um, areas that are you know lower income tribal areas, although the tribes do have their own governance and ability to fight back and try to be very discerning of who can build on tribal land. But also, if you're being offered, you know, millions of dollars per acre, those are really tough decisions to make and hard conversations to have. Just speaking from someone who lives in Northern Virginia, they're very hard conversations to have.

Carolyn Woodard 10:17

So everyone has strong feelings and opinions about AI. Um, people have legitimate reasons to be talking to nonprofits about AI. Um, so there's tilts towards yes, there's tilts toward no, and you can hold all of those things uh simultaneously. So

Carolyn Woodard 10:36

I wanted to talk about this article that I read this week called Can Tech Philanthropy Solve What Tech Extraction Creates?

Carolyn Woodard 10:44

So getting back to these systemic issues and uh critique of philanthropy that's been along around as long as philanthropy has been around, back to the Gilded Age and the robber barons, who you know created colossal messes uh of you know, displacement of workers, um, working conditions, pollution, uh, impact on rural areas as well. You know, if you think about the trains and factories, and then kind of tried to turn around and say, oh, but we're we'll build you a library. We're we're good people, we're philanthropists, we're gonna use our fortune for good. So that is something that's been around.

Carolyn Woodard 11:27

And so this article by Michelle Flores Vryn was just published in Nonprofit Quarterly, and I'll share the link in the show notes. Um, she is responding to that idea of the third wave of giving, which I talked about. There was um a lot of people were talking about it. I want to say back in May, this article came out about the amount of money that is gonna flow into philanthropy from these new companies like Enthropic and OpenAI and Microsoft and Amazon, um, just because of the sheer profits that they're making uh and their what's our what they've already pledged to um put into philanthropy.

Carolyn Woodard 12:11

So that article um this spring was more about we're not ready. We're not ready for this scale of money that's gonna start coming in. And also we're not ready for these kind of tech disruptors, they are not gonna use traditional philanthropic models. Like, I don't even know if they'll use donor-advised funds, um, but they are probably only a few of them are going to give to foundations to turn around and give to the programs that those foundations work on, if they're gonna create their own funds or their own philanthrop um their own foundations or just give in different ways. Uh, it'll be interesting to see. Well, we'll all be seeing it, whether it's interesting or not. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 12:54

But as part of that third wave of giving, this new article is a critique of that thought that you can be incredibly disruptive and then use the profits from that destruction to create something. And um her argument is that the money can't repair the harms of that extraction phase, because partially because the extraction and the destruction has already happened, and partially because the decision makers on the whole remain geographically and institutionally separated from the people who are bearing the costs.

Carolyn Woodard 13:36

And one example she gives is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which started out going to fund K through 12 education and climate work, and it has made a shift toward technology and biomedical research driven by generative AI. So the priorities followed the funders' interests and not the communities that had been impacted that were the initial idea of what they would fund. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 14:05

In this article, there's this fascinating case study of Texas data center resistance. Uh, she is a Texan, uh, I am not, but it's I urge you to read it. I'm not gonna summarize it here because I couldn't do it justice, but she calls out the pretty much unified opposition to data centers, and it is across the political spectrum, as you can imagine in Texas. So um she I just I I urge you to read this article. It's a little bit long, but it's really good read.

Carolyn Woodard 14:44

And I think that it speaks to both this data center moment, which is having a galvanizing, it's kind of a lever point, I believe, a fulcrum, in the kind of realization and rationalization of what AI is literally actually doing to communities. So, you know,

Carolyn Woodard 15:08

For maybe a decade, maybe five, five years or so, there have been these thought pieces about, oh, if AI takes over thinking, what if AI becomes intelligent itself? All these kind of deep scientific and future science fiction-y kind of looking thoughts about AI while the industry raced ahead to make these tools that they could sell to companies and corporations and nonprofits. And the data centers issue is really um drawing attention to the costs in ways that those kind of theoretical pieces did not did not make clear.

Carolyn Woodard 15:50

So, a way that the um the funders, the money, the profits are shaping the way priorities are seen, both in society at large and then in the nonprofit sector, it's just good keeping an eye on. Um

Carolyn Woodard 16:08

And it doesn't mean that people are lying. I mean, marketing, I don't know, is marketing lying? I don't know. But uh it it I don't want to imply that this is because it's all nefarious and it's all bad. Uh the people who are AI boosters also have some good things that they want to make sure we know about. Um and of course, the people who are really concerned about the environmental costs also want to make sure that we know about that. So I just want to call those things out. They are both true at the same time. And um,

Carolyn Woodard 16:43

I wanted to kind of stay on Texas for just a minute and talk about an article from Wired that I read this week that was about the the external costs, environmental costs to AI, in that to summarize, fossil fuel companies are have been using AI for over a decade to figure out how to make their work more efficient. And that's both in like where do they drill, but also how can they, you know, extract the fossil fuels better, how can they sell them better? How can companies that use fossil fuels use them, use more of them, right? Because they want to make a profit.

Carolyn Woodard 17:32

So Chevron is building a gas plant in Texas that is going to power Microsoft data centers. The Microsoft data centers are going to power the AI inside of Chevron that make them able to get more people to use more fossil fuels. That's the only way I can state it. In this article in Wired, uh, the author, Will Alpine, says it's the self-reinforcing effect between supply and demand. So you can't separate them out independently. Chevron is using fossil fuels to fuel this data center, which helps it use more efficiently pull out fossil fuels to make more profit.

Carolyn Woodard 18:22

So it's not a closed loop. It has a lot of external effects. It's interesting in the context of this episode. So it's not even just the loop itself around data centers. You know, I've talked about how nonprofits are excited about using AI in ways that they couldn't before that'll be really beneficial, like in cancer research is just like kind of an obvious one. Uh, but also, you know, in analyzing satellite imagery of deforestation, maybe satellite imagery of data center placement.

Carolyn Woodard 18:59

This case is kind of that same case, but within industry and within an industry that's, you know, really bad for the planet. There is reason to be skeptical and worry about AI washing, that AI is AI itself is going to help enable these destructive, dirty industries to be better at saving the planet, right? To be more efficient, like to use more renewables in the grid or to, you know, burn fossil fuels in ways that are less destructive. Like it can AI can be used to, you know, design better, I don't know, chimneys, or I'm not clearly an environmental scientist, but you know, you think that there must be ways that AI could be used for those use cases. And I guess I would say only if it's profitable. Like if the company sees that that is something that they want to invest in, but they're also going to use AI to invest in profits that are potentially more destructive to the environment and to the communities. Um,

Carolyn Woodard 20:03

So for every tech forward nonprofit who is sharing case studies in the McGovern Foundation database of ways that AI is having those beneficial impacts, there are companies that are also using AI to do something more efficiently with a profit motive, not a humankind motive.

Carolyn Woodard 20:25

Sorry to have a downer, but you know, as I've been talking throughout this podcast about reasons to be skeptical, reasons to be optimistic, reasons to get AI literate because guarantee this is impacting your community and the communities that you care about in these even larger ways. Um so good thing we have journalists who are looking into it. Um

Carolyn Woodard 20:49

It's not a reason not to use AI, um, but it is a reason to think about where the attention on AI is coming from and where it's going to. So philanthropy is trying to direct a lot of capital, and more and more will be coming in to be redirected from the AI industry toward visible, fundable, locally organized opposition to and mitigation of harms, right? Public attention follows that same path. People are worried about the data centers and should be worried about these other issues outside of the data centers. Um, but

Carolyn Woodard 21:29

I think it's important to just think about who decides what nonprofits see and look at. So, Community IT, of course, we're an IT services provider. When nonprofits adapt new technologies, we try to assist them with that. Uh, you know, we get a benefit from that because it's what we do. We help nonprofits use technology effectively so that they can do their missions. Um, I did I do uh prepare my podcasts with help from AI tools, including um, you know, Claude is is my main uh go-to, but I do use Gemini also. So I am not an independent observer or your booster or uh cautionary tale. So I wanted to make that clear too. Um

Carolyn Woodard 22:18

I just wanted to make sure to to name that we are all. In this big experiment right now. And I mean, we're always in a big experiment. There's always companies that are trying to sell us something or extract something. You know, I was alive in the 70s with the oil shock. So it's not that this has never existed before. This has existed.

Carolyn Woodard 22:42

I think, you know, what AI is doing is showing us the scale at which those benefits, again, can go to the highly resourced corporations. You know, Chevron is, you know, billions of dollars its own self compared to the nonprofit sector. And so I guess I'm not sure what to think about as a sector. We are, I've been thinking this for, you know, a couple of years now. In hearing philanthropy and foundations talking about being able to be good stewards of AI as a resource, we are so small compared to the for-profit sectors and the money that is in for-profit right now and is flowing around between AI and for-profit sectors.

Carolyn Woodard 23:32

So I guess maybe I'm coming back to that as well of you know, an individual boycotting AI at this point, like you can do that because it fits with your values. You don't want to use it, but don't think that you are having an impact on the industries.

Carolyn Woodard 23:48

So for me, my opinion, I think I come down on the more you know about it, um, whatever niche you're in, like whatever problems and challenges your nonprofit works on, it's really important at this fulcrum to be aware of and thinking about the impacts that AI and the what AI is doing to capitalism, our countries, you know, the planet. Thinking about the ways those are interacting with your specific challenge that your nonprofit works on. And whatever that is, there is no way four or five years from now you're gonna come out of this period without having been impacted by AI.

Carolyn Woodard 24:38

So knowing as much as possible about it, I think is where I come down to. And wherever that information, I mean, as much as you can understand where you're getting that information from, uh, that's really important to you. So as you form your opinions and form your decision, make your decisions about how you are gonna use AI, how your nonprofit is gonna use AI, um, how the communities that you care about are using AI, are being impacted by AI. I guess that's what I want to leave you with is each person has to make their own decisions. And I will include as many of these articles as I can in the show notes for you to check them out yourself.

Carolyn Woodard 25:20

So the messengers, AI companies, they build useful tools, they need adoption. The nonprofit sector is using these tools. I mean, Claude has gone, anthropic with Claude has really gone after the nonprofit sector. Uh, but the other big companies are too Microsoft, Google, Amazon, uh, OpenAI. So just be aware of that.

Carolyn Woodard 25:47

Funders, of course, funders want grantees to be effective, they want them to be sustainable. If there's this amazing new tool out there, they want them to be able to use it. They want to fund their ability and capacity to use that. Uh, increasingly, they will be getting funding from the AI industry. So just being aware of that as you're going through making these decisions.

Carolyn Woodard 26:10

Vendors and IT providers, including Community IT, we know these tools. We're learning these tools with you. We know they can genuinely help. Uh, we are growing and learning and partnering with you as you adopt these tools and make these decisions. Uh, so that's what this nonprofit AI podcast is really about is trying to not make decisions for you or present a single viewpoint, but give lots of pros and cons for lots of these decisions.

Carolyn Woodard 26:39

Environmentally engaged nonprofits are trying to be heard in this media environment and they're, you know, up against, like I said, a billion-dollar campaign from the industry that AI is good. So if you're an environmentally uh oriented nonprofit out there trying to kind of scream to be heard about the drawbacks and um destructive nature and um other environmental issues.

Carolyn Woodard 27:06

And then, of course, you know, nonprofits generally, all of this knowledge was stolen. So the nonprofit sector is very aware of data sovereignty, data issues of who owns the data about yourself and uh how nonprofits interact with that, how foundations and funders interact with that.

Carolyn Woodard 27:27

So as you go forward and you're thinking about the ways you're thinking about AI, just ask yourself who paid for this? What do they sell? What are the things that this source is not going to tell me? Um,

Carolyn Woodard 27:40

And you can give yourself permission for not yet. We would always say being intentional about it is important. If you don't have capacity to be intentional about it, um, you can wait. But educating yourself as much as possible is what I will still fall back on, because as I said, it will impact everyone.

Carolyn Woodard 28:00

Having someone at your organization who is the AI owner, that role I think is important, whether or not you are adopting AI or not as an organization. Um, you need someone who, you know, so everyone isn't going crazy trying to read all the articles about it. Uh, having someone at your organization that you designate, or a committee that you designate as the, you know, people who will present the information that you need to make these decisions. Um, that is something I think that is important. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard 28:34

I talked last week about this new job title, the um uh chief AI officer uh that some for-profit companies are making and some foundations. So you don't need to have it at that level or you know, pay someone the salary that that title implies. But having someone at your organization that's interested in it and that can, you know, help tame the fire hose of information and make sure that your organization has the information you need to make the decisions that are in line with your values as an organization. That's important.

Carolyn Woodard 29:11

So that's all I got for you this week. Uh, some some things that are downers and some things that are just like keep on your radar and think about and uh keep keep having this open discussion, I think, is also just so important in this moment. So um it can feel like we're just talking about AI all the time. And I want to make sure this podcast is not just, well, here's a new tool, here's how you use it, but really uh go behind the why we're using AI, what AI is, um, how it's impacting our communities that we care about, and just ways to think about it. So I don't have any answers basically this this week. But hopefully I have some resources that you can use.

Carolyn Woodard 29:53

And we'll be back on Friday with the regular community IT technology topics podcast. And I'll be back here on Tuesday with more nonprofit AI. Until then, take care.