I'm very optimistic about AI's potential in general, as well as in the nonprofit sector and the plant-based diet specifically. This is my own lens, although I do make sure to stay informed about AI risk.

I have read Yuval Noah Harari's first three books, which focus extensively on AI risks, and watched numerous talks on the topic. Still, I think there is a lot to gain from embracing openness to AI and utilizing my own exploratory, research-driven point of view, being technology-positive.

I think that a pessimist (as opposed to a realist) might be equally biased, so take what I say as a counterargument to balance the AI-negative point of view, which I suspect we tend to adopt in the EA space more often than people adopt it in other places, focusing on problems rather than potential and seeing what is wrong instead of what is right.

And frankly, I think that people who are AI-negative might not be aware of what AI can do for them and the plant-based movement:

 

Grants

• It can help you decide whether you should apply in the first place, quickly finding information about the deadline, what they fund, and what they don't fund (my own humble contribution - Vegan Grant Assistant, a GPT I created in order to write this post, based on my own extensive trial and error, partly based on my Next Step GPT, but tailored to grants).
• It can help you learn all the necessary factual information about the fund you are submitting to. Just ask any AI about the specific fund, which I think can benefit both the potential grantee and the fund.

Meetings

• It can create professional pitch decks, including not only design but also content (which, of course, you must fact-check), in minutes for any meeting with potential stakeholders, better looking than slides that took me four days to create manually.
• It can help you prepare for a meeting. Simply provide a link to the person's page, and it will teach you everything you need to know about the person you are meeting with in minutes.
• It can go beyond transcribing and summarizing meetings, just ask it to "give you action items, to which you can add checkmarks and save your progress in a beautifully, aesthetically, colorfully, well-designed cheatsheet," which is one of my main uses of this specific AI tool.
• It can help you manage your projects equally well or better than Notion, which also has an AI feature with the same prompt and AI tool I just mentioned. The same prompt and AI tool are also helpful when applying for grants, as they allow you to provide the AI with your previous successful grant proposal.

Academia

• From finding gaps and mapping the most influential papers to reading papers and reports aloud for your literature review to managing citations, AI can do it all.
• Staying up to date - sometimes you just need to decide whether to read the entire paper or just a lengthy piece online, and the abstract is not informative enough to make that decision. This is where AI-based podcasts come in.

Language

• Perhaps one of the most popular use cases. It can translate any language, check your grammar, and work its magic to improve your message or email and adjust your tone.
• It can read aloud the entire content for you to listen to on the go.

Coaching

• A leadership coach is only one example. I don't know if AI can replace a human coach. Still, it is undoubtedly more available, providing support 24/7, for a fraction of the cost or for free. Voice mode is highly recommended - just make a call. If your discussion resulted in a decision, such as writing an email or message to your collaborator based on the context you just discussed, the AI could do it too.

Needless to say, it all translates into productivity, promoting veganism. What people often tend to forget is that AI is not only faster but also does a better job.

We are concerned about the worker side of the equation - AI will take our jobs (not if we stay relevant)!

But what about the client-side? AI will benefit our clients. And our clients can be medical patients with a terrible disease, the animals with whom we have the privilege to share our planet, and the Earth itself.

And aren't our recipients the reason we are all here?