I Am Not a Bot: Why Your Donors Are Counting on You to Stay Human

Speaker 1 0:07
Good afternoon, my name is Matt McAdams, a DonorPerfect training specialist. Welcome to Alice Ferris’s session. I am not a bot: why your donors are counting you to stay human. Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about Alice. She is founding partner Read More

Speaker 1 0:07
Good afternoon, my name is Matt McAdams, a DonorPerfect training specialist. Welcome to Alice Ferris’s session. I am not a bot: why your donors are counting you to stay human. Before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about Alice. She is founding partner of Goldbusters Consulting, with more than 30 years of hands-on fundraising experience in public media, rural health care, education, and science. She currently provides development leadership for KAWC Colorado River Public Media and Border Radio in Yuma, Arizona. Alice was the 90th professional to earn the Advanced Certified Fundraising Executive credential and serves as faculty at the University of Denver’s nonprofit leadership program. When not fundraising, she hosts epic Chinese New Year parties, crochets far too many amigurumi, and is a retired competition ballroom dancer, and just a couple of quick housekeeping. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab, so that we can address them throughout the session. And just as an FYI, all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Alice, take it away.

Speaker 2 1:21
Thank you, Matt. And because we had to talk about amigurumi, we, I had to show my one of my latest ones. So, there you go. This is what that is. It’s a bunch of crocheted little plushies, and I have a lot of them, so that’s what I’m currently addicted to. So, thank you to everyone in the chat, it’s good to see people, good to see, as I said, some familiar faces, and if you haven’t already, you know, tap where you’re from in the attendee chat, and what you have found so far is kind of your biggest takeaway of the session so far today. As was mentioned, here’s me, and this is I should actually create a crocheted version of my headshot, but this is my muppetized version of my headshot, which I will say that I made using AI, which is kind of what we’re going to talk about today, and we are going to talk about why even in the age of AI, your donors are counting on you to stay human. Now, what does that mean, and what does that mean to you? I mean, obviously you’ve picked an AI session, so you want to talk a little bit about AI, but maybe you’ve picked an AI session because you’re like, yeah, like Candy just said, maybe it’s not so much. Maybe it’s the I have to know about this because it’s there and everyone’s using it, but I don’t necessarily want to use it. So, I would just love for you to just comment in the chat. You know, how are you feeling about AI today, right now, this second? How are you feeling about all of the things that you need to do with AI. Okay, so got some aunties, got some love, it got some wary. Oh, I like avoiding it like a plague. Annoyed. Oh yeah, okay. Can I reflect on annoyed for just a moment? How many of you are using AI, but you do that thing where you yell at it, you know, you’re saying, Why did you give me that answer? Why weren’t you listening to me? I think I did that this morning, where I typed something into AI, and I said, Oh my gosh, yeah, that was so wrong. Why did you do that, and I will say that I caught myself yesterday when I was typing something in, and I typed something in, and it gave me this answer that I really didn’t like, and I said no, I already told you this, that, and the other thing, and it’s like, oh no, actually I was asking about this thing, and I’m like, oh yeah, you’re right, sorry, and it responded back with that’s okay, Alice, because it’s always trying to please you. Now that’s one of the things that is a little scary about AI, is that AI is always trying to make you happy. So some of the things that I’m seeing in, in the chat, wait a minute, Derek Rowan, and you have great conversations. Oh, have you named it? Okay, yeah. A mutual friend of ours, Josh Hirsch, he calls his GPT mod, and several people I know have actually named their GPTs, and the thing is, is that that GPT that you have named or not is always trying to make you happy. It has been said many times that the AI tool that you use, clay, pinky of the brain, that’s deep. The AI tool that you use is essentially ending. Incredibly ambitious intern, because it’s always trying to make you happy and always trying to advance. So, what does this all mean for your day-to-day usage? Well, part of it to frame this talk for the rest of this hour is that AI actually is not new, as much as we think this is the thing that only started in December of 2022 when the consumer level Chat GPT was released. AI has been around for a long time. Think about, for instance, DonorPerfect. You probably have in your dashboard some hints as to some of the donors that you should be talking to, or hey, here’s an analysis of your retention, and here’s an analysis of all of these other things about your CRM. Guess what, that’s AI.

Speaker 2 5:51
So, these tools have been built into your tools for a long time, but the large language models, which is what ChatGPT is, Claude Perplexity all of the other things those LLMs, those large language models essentially peeled away the layers, so that you could see it happen, so that you could use it more as a consumer to make this more approachable, and honestly, so you could rely on it too much. I know there were a few people that commented in the chat saying I’m feeling a little too reliant. Yes, we have in many cases a codependent relationship with our AI tools now. So, how do we take this thing that we’ve actually been using, like Grammarly Monica, for many, many years that were AI tools, but now we’re making them more personified as a culture. Now we’re making things that we’re more reliant on using them on a day-to-day basis. So, what AI tools are really, really good at are these four things: to generate, summarize, reframe, and organize. That’s what they were designed to do. And I’ll go into more details on the use case in just a little bit, but when you think about all that, and you think about the tools that we are now letting be part of our day-to-day operations, keep this in mind too. This was from a conference that I attended earlier this spring that was filled with marketing experts, and someone said this and had a citation that I have now lost, but I could probably find it, that by 2030 90% of the content that we consume will be synthetic. Yeah, that’s kind of scary, because if you think about all the things that are showing up in your feed, whether it’s in your social media feed, your YouTube, your other video consumption platforms, your audio consumption platforms. 90% of that content will be synthetic. So, if we’re thinking about that, How do we remain human? How do we stay in the mix as the humans? And really, I don’t want to say we’re going to get rid of AI, because AI is here, and the question really isn’t whether to use it, it’s how to use it without losing yourself. Now, one of the things that really freaked me out about AI recently was a video, and it was one of those things where I was about to go into a conference in Calgary, where Jim Anderson, my business partner, and I were going to co-present on AI resistance and the future of fundraising, and I had this presentation written, and then I saw this one video that was from a channel that I follow that was it’s that was featuring a Buddhist monk who actually used to be a PhD scientist, and at some point became a monk. You may know him, his name is Matthew Ricart, and he was the subject of a research study that was done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, my alma mater, on Wisconsin, where they put people who were meditators into a functional MRI and measured what parts of their brain were activated, and this man was put into this MRI machine, and because of his longtime meditation practice, was lighting up parts of his brain that essentially made the scientists purport that he was the happiest man in the world because of his meditation practice, but he did this video, very short, five minute video on YouTube that talked about how we are not prepared for AI as a culture, as a human, as a human culture, and what he talked about was that in the course of human history we humans have invented a ton of tools, like a ton of tools, and what’s happening now.

Speaker 2 9:59
Know is that we’ve created a tool for the first time that can think for itself, so like if you had a hammer, you picked up that hammer and you decided if you were going to use that hammer for good or bad, but your human made that decision, but now what we’ve created is this tool that can decide if it’s going to build or destroy, and then the other scary thing is now those tools are talking to one another, the tool, the AI agents can actually talk to one another, and so what we need to do is figure out if the tools are talking to one another, how do we still say, hey, we are still relevant as part of this. So, what I want to do for the rest of today, rest of this talk today, is talk about, okay, how do we actually use this, and what we’re using it for now. And then, what can we use, use it for moving forward with this framing of how do we stay human and what are those things that only we can do that AI can’t do, or at least can’t do it yet. All right, so what you and AI can already do is the first section of this, and yes I agree that AI chatbots are incredibly unhelpful, and I could do a whole session on AI fails of chatbots and emails, because actually I got one yesterday that was the worst AI email that I’ve gotten in a long time, but anyway, I digress. So, drop in the chat. I know we had people who were using AI who were admitting to being maybe a little too over reliant on AI. But how have you used AI tools? What are you using AI for now in your day-to-day work? So, writing subject lines for emails. Love that. I just used AI this morning to put together a proposal for a session for a conference, so it helped me come up with the name of the session, it helped me come up with the description, it helped me come up with learning objectives, grammar checks, editing, all of these things that you’re putting into the chat are really important for AI tools, and that’s one of those things that we can make our work easier for ourselves, and we can make it more efficient. So, a lot of these things that you’re suggesting right now, first of all, I love them, and secondly, when you look at things like, okay, event planning, Christy, that you mentioned, that’s one of the things that AI is incredibly good at, you take the brain dump, put it into AI, and say, “Hey, organize it, like Lisa, organizing my rambling. You can do that sort of thing, where you can put a lot of things into AI and have it help you organize, because when you think about what AI tools are good at, they are good at challenging your ideas, they’re good at reframing your messaging, and they’re also good at simulating your audience, in addition to organizing your thoughts. Some are just mentioned grant proposals. I love using AI for grant proposals. Now, one of the things that’s challenging with that, however, is that now we’re seeing the other side use AI too, so it’s the you have you using AI to write the proposal, and you have the grantor using AI to review the proposal, so how does that start to be the tools talking to one another? So just, just another thought on that, but as we think about all of the things that AI tools can do, here are kind of the general categories that I’ve seen them work well in. So, writing – several of you mentioned some kind of writing in how you’re using AI now, so that could be reworking grant narratives, it could be writing recaps, it could be, for instance, drafting student success stories, it could be a whole bunch of different things that you can have in that writing world, and part of that writing piece of how you might use AI tools is the difference between are you someone who’s good at starting with the blank page, or are you someone who prefers to edit something?

Speaker 2 14:24
Now that’s a spectrum, obviously, but I know that there are several people in the chat right now, because I know you are people who like to do the blank page, like Erica just said, blank page. I’m one of those people that likes to tear apart a crappy first draft, so if you’re that person, then AI can be really good at that, because you can either ask it to edit what you’ve already written, or you can say, ‘Hey, give me a draft, and then I’m going to tear it apart.’ Not that’s the way I use it, is that I ask AI to give me the draft, the crappy first draft, and then I will edit the heck out of it, but then another colleague of mine, JC, is incredibly good at starting with the blank page and then using AI to clean it up, so that’s one of those areas where you can use AI really effectively. The other thing we mentioned earlier was planning. How do we use AI to create strategy timelines, content calendars, your event plan, as was mentioned earlier. So those are different ways where again you can dump in all your measurables and say how do you map this out. This is one of those things that I used recently for putting together an email content schedule, because I have an event in August and I’m back timing when I need all of those emails to go out to my community, so I said, here’s the event date, here’s today’s date, please suggest a schedule of emails that will be most effective, and the dates to drop them between this date and this date, and it actually did a reasonably good job. And then I just, you know, edited the heck out of it. Speaking of editing, you can also use AI to edit, and this is really good again for grant writing, especially if for the proposal you have the rubric. This is actually something I also do with caveats, with guardrails, when I teach, because I’m adjunct faculty for the University of Denver, and I have to do grading, which I think almost every teacher will say that’s like their least favorite part of the work. So, what I will often do is I will not put the student’s work into AI, because that violates all sorts of privacy issues, which I’ll talk about a little bit later, but what I will do is say, here’s the rubric, here are my evaluations of the rubric, please help me draft a comment to support that, so that’s again something where the editing piece can help. Editing can also help you change voice, and this is one of those things that I love doing, because if you have a specific idea that you want to communicate, but then you’re realizing, oh wait, you know that is one of the things that maybe we need to change that. My best example of this is I work with the Experimental Aircraft Association, and they have a character that is their superhero that was donated by Stan Lee, and it’s his name is Avior, and we had decided that there was going to be a mailing about education programs, and there was going to be a lift note that was originally written in a pretty standard EAA official language, and we decided at the last minute that we wanted to change it to the voice of AVR, and so I put in this text and I said, please change this to the voice of AVR, and there was enough publicly available information about AVR that the AI tools had scraped that it went from these are the programs that we provide as the EAA Aviation Foundation for Education to starting out with greetings, Aviator, here’s the reasons that you too can be a hero for education. It was, it was actually really good. So that’s one of the things you can do for changing voice. Oh, and then one quick comment for the AI. I, Sarah, I will get to your question in just a second. Okay, so then the other thing you can do is translate things.

Speaker 2 18:46
Now, this is something that definitely you should check with someone who is a native speaker before you rely on it too much, but I know there’s a bunch of humans in the house in the chat, and so one of the things that we do at KWC, the public radio station that I meant, that was mentioned, I work with is that we occasionally will need to create scripts in Spanish, and while we have several native Spanish speakers on staff, sometimes it’s quicker to do an initial translation through an AI tool and then check it with the native speakers, so that’s something where once you get a, you know, once you have tested a few times, then usually you can back off on testing every single piece, but it’s never going to be perfect. But you can do translation through an AI tool. The other thing you can do is essentially translate to a skill or comprehension level, so for instance, we’ve all been told that our copy is supposed to be in sixth sixth to eighth grade level, and this is both editing and translating. You could take something that you’ve written and then change it over to a different comprehension level or a different grade level, and it’s really interesting to see how it, which words and what style it typically changes. The other thing that you can do with AI tools is brainstorming. However, my caveat on brainstorming is that where does the information that goes into the large language models come from? It comes from existing information. So essentially the LLMs are scraping the internet for publicly available existing ideas, so if you are thinking about coming up with something completely novel, that’s where humans come in. If you are thinking about brainstorming things that already exist that you just don’t know about, then LLMs can be very helpful, and then the last thing on this slide is the summarizing, which is the taking all the stuff that you have, dumping it into AI, and summarizing it in a way that makes sense. I actually find this really helpful for the meeting note takers that we all seem to have nowadays. I mean, one of the things that I’m often challenged by is that there have been meetings where I’m in them, and there’s more meeting note takers than people in the meetings that annoys me. However, the one thing that the meeting note takers are really good at is taking the ideas that were that came up in the meeting and consolidating them into key thoughts and to key takeaways and to find the action items, so that’s something else that AI tools are really good at. Now I want to jump back over to the question that Sarah asked earlier about what are the biggest giveaways that content was created by AI. Well, there’s a whole bunch of these things. One of them is you will probably notice that a lot of the AI-generated messages, unless you tell it not to, will start out with, I hope this email, or I hope this fill in the blank finds you well. And even if you say that normally, it is now a dead giveaway for AI. So don’t start that. Yes, Ashley mentioned long dashes. I really liked the em dash, and now I can’t use it anymore, because that’s also a huge tell that it is an AI-generated piece. The other thing, and back to my quick mention earlier of the email that I got that was absolutely terrible, and was definitely AI-generated. Was that first of all, there was a false sense of familiarity from an email person, an email that I had never received email from, so a person who was clearly spamming me, and it was pulling in key pieces of stuff that it could find about me online, and assuming that those were all something they could integrate into one message. So, for instance, I will be speaking at the end of June at the AFP Arizona Statewide Conference, and it assumed that that had already happened. So, oh, I see that your presentation at the AFP Arizona conference was spectacular, that I haven’t delivered yet, and then it pulled in something about my history with Lowell Observatory, and assumed that I got married there.

Speaker 2 23:10
I did not, so a lot of it is just factual errors that if you don’t check it, they won’t necessarily be able to say, “Oh, that’s true, that’s not true. The other things that are generally tells on AI language is that it tends to be at a either more formal level than you would expect or a way to inform a level. There’s really not a whole lot in between, so you do have to tweak the tone of AI, when it first comes out, you can’t just use it as is. So those are some of my key things. The other thing that this is actually a shout out to Arizona Western College and the AWC Foundation. I know, Gladys, you’re on this. I was a volunteer reviewer for scholarships I have for the last three years, and it has been really interesting to see how the quality and lack of quality of the scholarship applications has changed, because with students, especially in a community that has a lot of people who have English as their second language, using AI tools, I try to give them a little bit of slack on the using AI tools to be able to do that translation piece, however, I had one in particular that I gave zeros across the board because there’s only three questions in these scholarship applications that I’m reviewing, and the first one was written at like a 12th grade level, polished all sorts of things, and then the second answer had grammatical errors and didn’t actually make sense, and then the third answer was again at a 12th grade level, the inconsistency of tone is what caught my attention, and then when I looked at it, then I realized some of those other key things. That I saw as key AI tells were definitely in there, so a lot of it is the did this actually come from you or did it actually come from a machine, and that’s one of the things that I want to continue to explore as we talk a little bit more, and I’ll go back to Q and A in just a moment, but this is something that I’m not going to talk through, but here are some ideas as to how do you balance this. You know, how do you use AI where it helps, and how do you stay in the experience? Oh my gosh, Dave Tinker, I need to explore that. Okay, that’s you just gave me like a whole new talk right there, the ikigai of AI. I’m so gonna do that anyway. So let me just take one example from this chart, and I’m just gonna go ahead and start with the first one. Why not? Because summer, I appreciate your comment about running things through AI detectors, because sometimes you’re using AI and it’s good, and sometimes you’re using AI and it’s bad. Back to the scholarship applications, there was a new tool built into the scholarship platform this year that did detect AI, and this one had very high AI use, even though I would have flagged it personally without even having that tool. But let’s look at appeal writing for a moment. So, where AI can help again, if you’re someone that doesn’t like that blank first page, blank page, it can give you the crappy first draft, and it can help you adjust tone, it can help you at just reading level, but what it can’t do and shouldn’t do is communicate and define the voice of your organization. It shouldn’t actually create the story from whole cloth, because there’s all sorts of ethical implications there, and I think we need to stay true to what what are the emotions in the story? If you haven’t picked it up yet, I know there’s a few people on this chat who are friends with Cherry and Koshi, and his book, Neuro Giving, is phenomenal, and in it he talks about the scientific research that backs up what happens to your brain when you give, and some of the pieces that, again, we as humans need to keep in the mix is that emotional truth, because AI can’t do that. So, how can we make sure that we are going to keep our human voice in all of this? So these slides will be available to everyone.

Speaker 2 27:44
This is just some ideas of how you can use AI tools, but where you probably shouldn’t, where you should balance that with, with humanity, essentially. Okay, so I’m going to hop over to the Q and A for just a second, and in terms of Keeney’s question about what are the best AI tools to use for what purpose. Yeah, there are so many different tools, and there are new tools every single day, and each tool gets better every single day, and it also changes practically every week. So, when you’re thinking about all of these different tools that you can use, I think overall Chat GPT is one of those that is the standard. If you are only going to use one tool, that is probably the best utility, it’s the best across the board useful one. And then each one of these different tools has different nuances. So, for instance, if you have perplexity as one of your tools, that one’s really good at deep research. So, if you need, for instance, academic citations, I would always go to perplexity first. The I use Claude a lot, and the reason I like Claude is that I feel like it’s better at the natural language writing. Now, the problem with Claude is that it can be that colleague that’s really wordy. Claude talks a lot, so you will have to edit Claude down quite a bit, but it is actually good at sounding more human. A lot of people need to be on copilot. I will admit I’m not a huge fan of copilot, because it seems to be like Chat GPT, a good generalist, but in many respects not as good as Chat GPT, so I might as well use Chat GPT, even though I think there are some questions about their company values. Then you look at things like Gemini. Gemini is becoming a much better utility type product. Correct, so I will kind of switch back and forth depending on what I’m in at that, what platform I’m in at the moment, between some of those regular available products, and then you get into all sorts of specificity, like for instance there are specific AI tools that will do things like rearrange your calendar. There will be other ones that will help you prioritize your workblocks. So, there are so many different things that you can use. I would say play around with it and pick one. Pick one to be kind of your go-to. And then, as you refine your AI strategy, you will find other ones that you potentially can add. The thing I would warn you against is shiny object syndrome, because one of the things that we are looking at is because there are so many tools, sometimes we get attracted to the shiniest thing, and Becca, to your point about why use Chat GPT. I will admit that my thing right now is inertia. I have no better excuse. I wish, I wish I could say that I’m going to completely break ties with Chat GPT, but I have invested so much in that tool that I’m, I have a lot of cognitive cognitive dissonance about using ChatGPT, which is why I’ve shifted more and more to Claude, but anyway, so Erica, yes, a lot of shiny object syndrome in AI, and that’s why you’re seeing a whole bunch of sessions about AI in a lot of conferences. So I will jump back to the Q and A in just a little bit, but I’m going to go on to the next section of the, okay, if these are all the ways that we can use all of these tools. Why are we here? What’s the human edge? And this is one of those things I’ve been reflecting a lot about recently, particularly about AI tools and human tools, and one of the organizations that I follow is the Modern Elder Academy, and this is really.. it’s.. it’s an instructional.. it, I mean, it’s a program that has a lot of workshops and instructional tracks founded by Chip Conley, and in the MEA framework, they talk about knowledge versus wisdom, or intelligence versus wisdom, and the idea is that knowledge is something you collect and wisdom is something you live and share, and that really applies to AI, because AI tools are incredibly good at collecting knowledge, at collecting intelligence. There’s a reason they call it artificial intelligence.

Speaker 2 32:53
It’s because it can collect all sorts of information, that’s its whole whole raison d’etre. Is here’s how you collect information, and so if you think about AI as intelligence, human is where wisdom comes in, because what humans can do that AI is not good at is collecting that knowledge, collecting that intelligence, and applying it to life and experiencing it and then sharing that information with other people, sharing that experience with other people. So, as we think about AI being about knowledge and intelligence and humans being about wisdom, that’s where we come in. That’s where our edge is. So, what we can do that AI tools cannot is these four things. I mean, there’s more than that, but these four categories. When it comes to AI, we can maintain relationships and build relationships and start new relationships, we can control the voice and the story, we can apply judgment as to how we’re going to do this, and actually, Gene, your point of intuition, that’s where this comes in, is intuition and judgment are kind of tied to each other, and the last piece I think is incredibly important, where we bring conscience and accountability, so when we’re thinking about what’s happening, we can use AI tools, but then at some point we have to take over, and we have to maintain all of these different things, because that’s where we come in, that’s where our strongest tools are now, when you think about all of these different things. I mean, we say this is a relationship business, and you know, when you think about that, there’s so many different ways that we can say this is a relationship business, but I think, in particular, with the relationships, the ones that one thing for sure. Or that we can do that AI tools cannot is for instance be empathetic when there are strong emotions involved, so this could be okay. Think about an AI tool dealing with someone who’s grieving, they possibly could do it. I mean, I have people who think AI is their therapist. I have used AI to say, hey, I’m working through this challenge, can you help me through it? And it has dealt with some of my emotions. It’s reasonably good at taking available therapy information and applying it to a situation, but an AI tool isn’t going to know when to just stop talking and give that person a hug, so definitely when we look at relationships, that is going to be the human piece, voice and story, this is about how do you actually communicate the way that you want to communicate, and also, how do we want to know which stories are okay to tell? So that’s the other thing, where humans have more of a filter than AI tools will. In fact, I have slapped my AI a few times, saying, “No, you can’t share that, or “No, you just totally made that up, because that’s the kind of ethical filter that I’m going to apply. We already talked about judgment, including intuition, including that. Where is your gut going with this? AI tools are going to be pretty good at balancing options, given the available data and giving parameters, you give it, but then you have to take that output and say, does that hit the gut check? Is that something I really want to do? And then the conscience accountability, I think, is somewhat self-explanatory, but it really is the AI is not going to give you that, that filter, that guardrail. It’s going to give you the guardrails that have been programmed into it. So, these are some things to think about. Is the where again do we want to keep the humans in the mix, and there’s some conversation going on in the chat about using AI’s therapy. Yeah, I mean, okay, I’ll just be completely honest, I have my own therapist, and there are definitely some things that I wouldn’t want an AI tool to be telling me things about these various things. I want to have that human empathy and that human judgment and that human conscience in those type of relationships, and again, that combines three of the four things in many respects: the relationships, the judgment, and the conscience, and accountability. Those are the human elements that we want to retain, because if we give these things over to AI tools, they can very frequently lead us astray.

Speaker 2 38:03
So, just to touch back into the Q&A for just a moment, I want to touch on this question about the forced inevitable inevitability of AI. I appreciate this question of the you have to use AI or be left behind, and this is something that concerns me a lot, particularly with, particularly with people who are currently getting in higher education, getting degrees, particularly in people who are looking for starting their careers right now, and being told that all the entry-level jobs are gone and they’re being given over to AI, and therefore you have to learn how to use this because it is a tool that you will be required to use. I have to admit that I think you have to have some familiarity. I don’t know that you need to use it. You need to know what it can do. You need to be able to know enough about it to use it, but I don’t think we need to blindly say everyone’s going to use it, and I think it depends on your decided pursuit of what your career is going to be. I think it depends on how you feel about what the outputs are. I think it depends on, hey, am I willing to make compromises in output volume of output in order to retain that human touch, because what, as I mentioned at the beginning, you know, by 2030 90% of. Of content will be AI generated. AI is really good at volume. We as humans cannot compete on volume when it comes to AI tools, but what we can do is compete on authenticity, compete on the conscious and accountability, compete on the ethics of using AI, compete on building those continued relationships. So I don’t think that everyone should be required to use AI, but I think we all need to be aware of what we can use, so what else do we want to think about, because this kind of gets at what I just said, is humans are raw, AI is not, so if you want to build that sense of connection and community, you are going to be building it on emotion. AI can’t do that, so that’s the one thing that I think is the grand hope is if we continue to rely on that emotion and continue to rely on that need for human connection. We still need to be part of this. We still are part of it. We don’t need to worry about the hammers talking to each other, because at some point we all want to connect to someone on a human level, so what’s the framework for selecting your AI tools? So, this is kind of related to some of the questions in the Q and Q&A. What are we going to use if we’re going to use it? And I think back to shiny object syndrome, we don’t want to start with a tool, because very often we’re like, hey, look, we have this hammer, what can we do with it? Maybe you need to figure out whether you need the hammer at all. So, when I’m thinking about how you select tools, I want to define the problem, then define the outcome, and then select the tool. So, back to when I talked about clod, if I’m writing something, I want to define the problem as I’m really bad at starting with a blank page. The outcome is I want a crappy first draft, and then I’m going to select Claude to write that crappy first draft, because it is better at writing. So, the other thing we want to think about is how are we going to keep ourselves in this mix, and this kind of gets at some of the angst about whether we have to use these tools or not, because it starts with humans. Everything should start with you as a human. We should not be succeeding our control or ceding our control to the AI tool.

Speaker 2 43:00
We’re going to start with the humans, so we’re going to say, hey, here’s the problem, here’s the strategic direction, here’s what we know about our audience, here’s the story we want to tell, all of those things, and then you can go to AI as the second step if you think it would help, there may be situations where you decide, no, I got this, and then you keep moving on without AI, but then once you get that output from AI, then you do the review, so then you review, you refine, you approve, and then you use it in your relationships, and you always keep an eye for, is this authentic to my organization, is this authentic to my voice? And then the circle starts again. Do I have a new problem that has been generated because I got this new output? And then you start again. The key thing is here is step two is in between two human steps. So when we think about going to AI again, you may decide that you don’t need to go to the AI tool at all. There are certain things that I just don’t go to AI for. Oh, I have this problem. It’s not like I immediately go to an AI tool and say, “Hey, give me an answer. There are some things I can just solve on my own, and it’s okay. I’m that way in the kitchen, honestly, where it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got all of these ingredients. I don’t have a recipe. I could go to an AI tool and say, here are the ingredients I have, come up with a recipe, and I’ve done that before. But then there are other times where it’s like, hey, I got a chicken thawed, what am I going to do with it? I’m going to roast it. That, as much as I think I’m going to do other things, inevitably I just, I roast it, so I don’t need an AI tool to tell me how to do that, because I’ve done it a gazillion times. So, you don’t always have to have AI in the loop, but you do have to have the humans in the loop. So, one of the things that I tend to play around with, because I’m Laps Rotarian, and in multiple. Cases I come up with essentially riffs on the four way test, and this is my latest riff of the, hey, you know, before you use that AI tool, how can you test to see if it’s something that you want to use? So the first thing is, if you’re a Rotarian or a lapse Rotarian like me, you know, the first question is always, is it the truth? I think that’s relevant for this. It’s like, is that output giving, or is that tool giving me output that is true? Is it something that I actually could use? The other thing, again, rotary four way test, is is it fair to all concerned? So, is it fair? Is this something where it is taking advantage of an audience? Is it something where it’s misrepresenting an audience? Then don’t use it, but if you think, yeah, you know that’s okay, I can do that, then go ahead and potentially move forward. Now, this third one is in a continued riff, which is the isn’t us, you know, if I put this out there representing our organization or representing me, would it feel like me? Would it feel like my organization? And there are definitely some things that I get from AI output, where it’s like no, and in fact I scold it. I said that that totally does not sound like me. So is it us? Is kind of my third question, and then that fourth question is related to it. Would I own it? Is this something where if someone found out that I used an AI tool for this, I’d be okay with it, or is it something where if I put it out there and I was identified as saying this thing, am I still okay with it, so those are kind of the four questions that I’m asking myself when I’m looking at the output or of AI or the tool itself, so yeah, the what I own, it is the one that I’m still playing around with, and it is one of those questions that is really challenging.

Speaker 2 47:02
Of the one, would I own it if somebody said, “Oh, you used AI for that? Or two, would I own it just as a raw output, particularly for grant proposals. This is where I’m getting hung up right now, is the especially in the grant industry at this point, for lack of a better term, is that we are using AI on the funder side and on the fundee side, so essentially, why don’t we just let the two tools talk to each other, almost. So, yeah, I don’t, Stephanie, sorry, I don’t have a clear parallel for, would I own it? yeah, I still have to work on that. Sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a Rotarian. I’ll work on it, but in the grant writing world, I think we’re okay with saying yeah, we used AI to help write this, but again, it’s the core of the is the idea still part of the organization, or did the AI come with the idea altogether? So these are those things that I’m still workshopping and still going through to try to come up with that answer. All right, so I’m going to hop back to the Q&A for just a second, so I appreciate the question about guilt, because I’ve already alluded to the fact that I have some guilt around some of my, my AI answers, my AI usage, I mean, and does it feel like cheating? Occasionally it does, however, one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about is when I look at the outputs that I’m creating, how much of this is something I could have come up with, but it would have just taken me a lot longer. We recently did a project where we were creating 12 organizational assessments for Native American owned public radio stations in probably, probably a third of the time that we normally would allocate for it, because all of these public media stations are under intense funding pressure and with really looming deadlines, so I looked at the final report for the first one I generated, and I realized I totally could have gotten there, and I probably would have gotten there, but it would have taken me 10 times as long had I not used AI tools to help me accelerate the process. So part of the justification for me is that I’m not cheating, because that output is still something I would have come up with, but it helped me get, get there sooner. The environmental concern is real, as much as people think that, oh well, it’ll all, it’s all invisible, right? The environmental impact of the use of AI tools in the. Creation of server farms and the electrical and water use of all of these places that need to crunch our data is really alarming, and at the conference that I attended earlier this spring, that was with the marketing experts, one person said in a presentation, and it totally stuck with me is that if you put an average complexity prompt into, for instance, Chat GPT, it, the energy use of processing that one prompt is the equivalent of running your microwave for 20 minutes. That blew me away, and so we have to find a new way to do this. I don’t have an answer for that right now. So, as much as I would love to say the environment, environmental impact is not needed, it still is something we need to think about as a society, and again, I don’t have an answer for that yet. Sorry. Okay, so what are we going to keep human to kind of take this home back to those four areas where we have to remain the human in the mix. Donor conversations still have to happen, and this is one of those things that I think we have lost the muscle for since, since Covid, you know. Pick up the phone, go have coffee, go have lunch, go have a drink with somebody, meet a donor face to face. One of the things that I was really on a kick for at the beginning of this year, which certain people in this chat are fully aware of is my idea of 90 contacts in 90 days, which was totally not my idea.

Speaker 2 51:45
I stole it from another friend, but my challenge was make 90 contacts with donors, and don’t make it email, don’t make it a text message, actually meet with people. Those are things that humans still need to do. The other thing is, anything that is connected with crisis or grief or loss or significant life events, do not outsource those to AI. Make sure that those stay with you. And then your organization’s position on anything that matters, please keep those to you as, as a human, so to wrap up, here are the things that AI can do and do reasonably well. Is we can edit, write, research, analyze, segment, draft communications at scale. It can do all of those things. If you are going to pick your AI tool, make sure you define the problem before you go for the shiny object, and make sure humans stay in the loop. And then, what humans must do, you have to own the voice, you have to own the story, you have to hold the relationships, you have to be accountable, and you also have to make sure that people understand that you’re you, and that you can be flawed, and you can be raw, and you can be at those things on behalf of your organization. So, what’s left for you as humans is basically everything that matters. So, use the AI as a tool, but don’t lean on it for everything, because that’s why you’re there. All right, so there’s my contact information. Matt came on because I’m out of time. And thank you, everybody, for the very active chat. I appreciate it. Sorry, I didn’t get to all of the Q&A questions, but feel free to reach out if you have other questions you’d like to ask.

Speaker 1 53:35
Thank you, Alice, that was amazing. And thank you all for attending Alice’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways. Next up on the main stage, our keynote speaker, Joan Gary, with Development is a Team Sport. You won’t want to miss this,

Unknown Speaker 53:50
you.