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

New every Tuesday.

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Start a conversation :)

• Register to attend a webinar in real time, and find all past transcripts at https://communityit.com/webinars/
• email Carolyn at cwoodard@communityit.com
• on LinkedIn 
• on reddit/r/nonprofitITmanagement
• on the Community IT website

Thanks for listening.