The nonprofit mission at a Generative AI crossroads: Delivering on potential or defending against harm?
The emergence of Generative AI (Gen AI) promises to reshape society as we know it. Nonprofits - the entities focused on delivering societal, humanitarian and environmental benefit in the face of harm – are therefore in a direct position to tackle both opportunities and challenges that arise from the use of Gen AI. At the same time, nonprofits must weigh the ethics and implications of engagement with Gen AI. We consider here how nonprofits can make the most of this technology while mitigating its risks.
Part 1 | Opportunities for nonprofit organisations while navigating potential risks.
Efficiency Gains
NGOs that decide to invest in Gen AI will find exciting possibilities for improving efficiency, decision-making, and impact. While digital transformation has been a topic of focus in the nonprofit sector for years, the change from such initiatives has been primarily incremental in the last five years. With Gen AI, organisations experience new hope that digital engagement could bring true transformation to their operations, programs and missions.
We outline below some of the areas in which Gen AI could deliver immediate benefits, along with risks to mitigate in implementation:
Operational Efficiency
By automating routine tasks and streamlining processes, Gen AI could help nonprofits eliminate the use of costly staff time for rote or repetitive tasks, enabling those staff to instead take on the complex, nuanced work that leverages the best of human expertise.
Mitigating Risk: Ensure your use of Gen AI is creating new jobs rather than simply displacing or eliminating jobs. Coordinate with the HR function to re-skill and up-skill your workforce. Ensure there are still entry-level pathways into the organisation to continue drawing diverse talent to the sector.
Inclusion
By helping to translate and format information in a way that resonates better with the mindsets of funders and beneficiaries, Gen AI could help nonprofits reach new audiences and improve their impact.
Mitigating Risk: All language has bias. Provide careful oversight of machine-generated translations to ensure accuracy and cultural appropriateness.
Personalisation
Gen AI will enable organisations to engage in more targeted outreach and communication, thereby helping nonprofits build stronger relationships with interested parties, and even reach new audiences.
Risk Mitigation: Blatant use of profiles and personal data would undermine data privacy and the significant investment of resources that nonprofits put into personal information management. There is a risk, too, of mischaracterizing a target audience, leading to alienation rather than deeper connection. AI systems may lack cultural sensitivity, leading to ineffective interventions.
Monitoring and Evaluation
One of the biggest transformations in the nonprofit sector in recent years has been in monitoring and evaluation, with donors and collaborators alike seeking to understand the impact of donor dollars in reaching an organisation’s stated goals. Nonprofits can leverage Gen AI to develop more sophisticated impact assessment tools, enabling real-time tracking and deeper insights into program effectiveness. This includes using AI to analyse patterns, predict outcomes, and generate reports that clearly demonstrate the impact of initiatives.
Mitigating Risk: Data-driven management is essential to fully realising the benefits of Gen AI in Monitoring and Evaluation.
Knowledge Management
Gen AI enables tailored learning approaches and personalised training within the field of education. This can help nonprofits improve the ease with which employees access organisational knowledge, and offer information that matches an employee's needs and learning styles. This will break down the information walls that otherwise lead to siloing and limit program development.
Risk mitigation: Ensure your organisation respects data privacy and carefully manages the inclusion of sensitive information within knowledge management systems. Work with legal to understand data and privacy constraints.
Data Insights at Scale
Another potential benefit of Gen AI is its ability to manage scale in ways that humans cannot. With the ability to process vast amounts of data and make rapid decisions based on complex algorithms, Gen AI could help nonprofits accelerate informed decision-making and operate more efficiently.
Mitigating Risk: Consider carefully the role of humans in decision-making, particularly where vulnerable populations would be affected. Prior to seeing the results of Gen AI-driven data analyses, develop risk management models to ensure that AI-made decisions are properly controlled and aligned with the organisation's mission and values.
“When you invent a new technology, you uncover a new class of responsibilities. If the technology confers power, it starts a race. And if you do not coordinate, the race will end in tragedy.”
Institute for Human Technology
Image created by Google Deepmind AI
Part 2 | The “dark” side that can not be ignored. Here are a few additional points to consider:
Access
The very first consideration of Gen AI is that access to this powerful technology will certainly further exacerbate the inequities between the most powerful and most vulnerable. In order to benefit, one must be able to manage the cost, technical expertise and data availability required, which immediately excludes a significant number of people. NGOs should continue to face this gap and seek to close it in their use of Gen AI. Even within nonprofits there might be a gap emerging between using it and those that do not.
Sustainability
The energy consumption and environmental impact of AI deployments can be significant, potentially conflicting with sustainability goals, and ensuring the long-term viability of AI systems can be challenging.
Resource Allocation
The high costs associated with AI implementation can divert resources from direct service delivery, and smaller nonprofits may struggle to compete with larger organisations.
Job Displacement and Economic Roles
As AI becomes more capable, there is uncertainty about the roles humans will play in certain sectors, potentially leading to job displacement, social unrest, and reduced quality for beneficiaries. If job loss occurs accumulated in certain industries or regions there are multiple ripple effects this might create including increase of crimes, turning towards environmentally harmful practices such as deforestation, poaching for the pure necessities of life.
Ethical and Governance Challenges
The development and deployment of AI in sensitive areas like weaponry, combined with the speed of AI advancements outpacing regulatory frameworks, raises ethical concerns and the risk of unintended consequences. In war and crisis situations especially there is a risk for more severe damage and loss. Especially to be considered by humanitarian organisations.
Accountability and Transparency
Automation and delegation of tasks to AI can obscure accountability, making it difficult to trace decisions back to human agents, and reducing transparency in operations. With more up-pick of Gen AI in nonprofits it can mean a reliability on Gen AI. Especially dangerous when seeing that Large Language models are fed with data from the past not necessarily priming it for different ways of making decisions in the future.
While the potential benefits of Gen AI are exciting, realising measurable outcomes on the ground may take 10 years or more to materialise. Nonprofits must be patient and persistent in their adoption of Gen AI and practise adaptive management to speed the realisation of impacts. At the same time, Gen AI is already creating new harms in society beyond the promise that it offers. Nonprofits will on one hand race to meet the needs of newly-Gen AI-harmed communities while on the other seek to benefit from that same technology.
One of the greatest threats to our collective mission is the dissemination of misinformation. As Gen AI becomes more prevalent, there is a risk that actors with personal rather than societal interest in mind could use it to spread misinformation, damaging nonprofits’ ability to reach key beneficiaries and even damaging reputation. We believe our collective power is in jointly commiting to the dissemination of truthful information. Nonprofits must be vigilant in monitoring and addressing these risks to maintain the trust of their stakeholders.
In conclusion, while Gen AI offers exciting possibilities for transforming the way nonprofits operate and achieve their missions, we must approach it with a balanced perspective. Only nonprofits that proactively identify and mitigate potential risks will be able to leverage the opportunities that Gen AI presents. By taking a thoughtful and intentional approach, nonprofits can harness the power of Gen AI to drive meaningful change and improve the health and condition of all they serve.
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