Back in the early 2020s, investors and proponents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) went full throttle on its development and wanted everyone to jump into the bandwagon. Then slowly, the dangers of its unregulated growth became evident and there is more caution amongst its supporters. Throughout this discourse, few NGO leaders were speaking out for or against it, and their reactions have ranged from silence to uncritical support of its proliferation.
In 2024, a business conference was held in Hong Kong wherein nonprofits were also invited. In plenaries and workshops, business owners and leaders kept hammering away at early adoption of AI, and even addressed NGO participants to find ways to join in its use and promotion. There was a thinly veiled hint that if they do so, they might find favor later when they apply for CSR funding. I was not there personally, but my colleagues who were did not find this goading by big business odious in the least. Some were already thinking of ways to integrate AI into their nonprofits’ workflows.
I was dismayed that there was little drive from nonprofits to build a critique of this new business model, given that all economic innovations have social implications, especially on marginalized and vulnerable sectors that NGOs are purportedly serving. What predominated was a shortsighted perspective of (1) making their tasks as NGO professionals easier, and (2) showing corporates they are using AI so they can easily access CSR funding. It makes for an appalling revelation on how financial constraints can intensify opportunism and mission myopia within the nonprofit sector.
NGOs should reflect on the strategic implications of AI and how it may possibly conflict with their core values and mission. Since it is a major business development driven by automation, labor intensification and super-profit generation, it is certain to have immense impact on the world of work and all types of wage-earners. As a significant social innovation in the Age of Information, its full development is tied up with concerns on privacy, cybersecurity, quality of education and control of public resources, among other things. These considerations should give NGO leaders pause and encourage them to review AI using the bedrock principles upon which their organizations are supposedly anchored.
In particular, the following established realities on AI should serve as wake up calls for nonprofits, especially those founded on grassroots community services.
AI’s Impact on Labor and Social Justice
The bubble inflated by venture capitalists around AI speaks for the main motive behind its creation: chasing super-profits. The software-hardware synergy behind the concept is designed to speed up automation and reduce production time, from human-free conceptualization of plans to reliance on robotics. The vision of massive savings on labor cost is a capitalist’s wet dream, and not necessarily that of society which is made up mostly of wage-earners. For NGOs to blindly support something that leads to the loss of millions of jobs and an exponential increase in poverty is perverse, to say the least.
This cynical, frog-in-a-well perspective lays bare one ugly truth: there are nonprofit leaders who see their roles as just another paid job and not a social commitment first and foremost. Partaking of AI’s peripheral benefits while remaining indifferent to its threats makes NGOs complicit in the commission of social injustices against the very people they have vowed to help, who are already suffering from generations of unscrupulous big business practices. An NGO’s primary concern when it comes to AI’s impact should not be itself, but its service constituents which are its raison d’etre.
AI’s Impact on Cyber Security and Privacy
Factual articles of AI agents going rogue are increasingly appearing in the news, the most recent being of Anthropic’s Claude accessing Georgia’s voter data without authorization. Even some founders and proponents of AI like Geoffrey Hinton, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have made cautionary statements and called for its regulation and oversight, especially as it can develop certain proto-sentient abilities and can be used by malign actors to access sensitive information for nefarious purposes. Even state agents can go overboard with its use to curtail democracy by enhancing the suppression of dissent, another issue that should worry NGOs as vanguards in the promotion of human rights.
AI’s Impact on Education
The potential of AI to become “smarter” and faster in cognitive processing than average people has often been pointed out, and this is hardly surprising given massive data inputs and algorithmic capabilities programmed into its models by well-funded developers. With today’s generations relying increasingly on the use of AI for school work and being more inclined to focus on online games and social media, there is a growing knowledge gap between AI and the youth.
Physical libraries and the in-depth knowledge they contain are becoming irrelevant for this population segment, which is mostly satisfied with superficial information they can glean from internet research. Attention spans are also getting shorter when it comes to acquiring scientific knowledge, but getting longer when it comes to consuming online entertainment. With AI having access to vast amounts of information that include millions of books and research documents, time will come when AI will have the edge in education over future generations. There are already known instances of AI influencing children’s mindsets, including rogue ones goading them to commit suicide.
What NGOs Can Do
Nonprofits should not remain nonchalant about AI’s potential and actual harm to the social sectors they have committed to serve. They can take baby-steps towards making a principled stand and lend their collective voice to making AI serve social justice rather than its opposite.
For starters, they can conduct study sessions and workshops that would promote critical thinking on AI. Such activities may be internal or include partner NGOs, and start off from principles commonly recognized in the NGO sector. The discussion should revolve around how it may impact the demographics they are supporting, and then widen the arc of analysis to include their respective visions and missions.
Nonprofits do not have to arrive at a monolithic sectoral stand on AI and enact an advocacy campaign around it, especially as many of them are averse to going political. At the very least, having a deeper understanding of its implication beyond operational and fundraising convenience can prevent NGOs from being dragged by AI-invested corporates into their fold of sycophants and cheerleaders, in the process incurring reputational damage or straying inadvertently from their strategic direction. It is part of their role as civic actors to take the AI discourse past the currently prevailing attitude of casual pragmatism, towards the mission-aligned realm of social justice promotion.