Many nonprofit board members recognize the impact artificial intelligence (AI) is having at their workplace and in their personal lives. But it seems that only a small percentage are taking proactive steps, or even reactive steps, in response to the implications AI may be having on the nonprofits they help govern.
The board’s role is not to decide which AI tools staff should use, but to help ensure that the staff leadership is considering mission, values, compliance, risk tolerance, and long-term sustainability in its adoption and supervision of AI use. If the board is not familiar with some of the benefits that AI can provide consistent with its mission and values, consider the following possible impacts:
- deepening the nonprofit team’s understanding of the needs of the communities it serves and the communities it hopes to serve
- expanding the nonprofit’s reach and serving more people, including those who belong to underserved and overlooked communities
- increasing the effectiveness of the nonprofit’s program and services, communications, and advocacy
- creating greater efficiencies in the design and implementation of the nonprofit’s programmatic, fundraising, and administrative work
- strengthening informed decision-making at all levels
Of course, there are downsides and risks to the use of AI that also must be considered, including:
- overwhelming the nonprofit team with information, including a great deal of misinformation and data reflecting existing biases based on systemic and structural discrimination
- increasing harm to beneficiaries when the use of AI replicates and amplifies such misinformation and biases
- disclosing private and sensitive data in breach of privacy laws, confidentiality obligations, and the public’s trust
- intensifying the workload for staff, who may be unreasonably expected to vet and understand areas outside of their expertise, provide faster responses, and accomplish more because of their access to AI
- losing their communities’ trust because of the reduced personal contact, AI-toned communications, mistakes caused by an overreliance on AI’s accuracy and understanding, and shift in organizational focus from relationship-building to output maximization
Future posts will explore how the board can support staff with AI policy guidance, sufficient resources to help ensure mission- and values-aligned use of AI, and relevant feedback from their own experiences and knowledge. Also, we’ll touch on what AI can be used to support the board in its roles of setting direction, overseeing the nonprofit’s activities and affairs, evaluating the executive, and protecting the nonprofit’s charitable assets.
Impact of Recent News
President Trump’s directive to all federal agencies not to use Anthropic (Claude) because of the company’s insistence on setting principled conditions on the use of its AI tools (i.e., no mass surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons that could select and engage targets without meaningful human control) and the administration’s seemingly retaliatory designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk may be important to some nonprofits in their decision-making. The Department of War’s immediate entry into an agreement with OpenAI (ChatGPT) may also be a factor if a nonprofit selects a particular AI-powered generative search engine.
Anthropic has also been in the news for its announcement that its new AI, Mythos, has already uncovered thousands of weak points in “every major operating system and web browser.” AI now poses an existential threat to existing cybersecurity systems and everything they protect. Ex Machina is becoming real on many levels.
Rather than releasing Mythos to the public, Anthropic is sharing the tech with a select group of major companies, including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase and Nvidia, so they can test the model and strengthen their own systems against cyberattacks. Called Project Glasswing, the effort is aimed at helping key companies harden their defenses before hackers get access to Mythos or similar AI models, according to Anthropic. – CBS News