7 things to worry about when you use AI in fundraising

You can’t really avoid AI. Even if you completely boycott it, people around you are using it.

It has meaningful downsides. Here are some issues you should be aware of. None of them have anything to do specifically with fundraising.

1. AI Brain fry. You’re not imagining it. It’s a thing. AI exhausts you. It bowls you over. It tires you out with a mix of good, bad, and unclear information. It seems to save labor, but it may be making things a lot worse for a lot of people. (Read AI Brain Fry: What Nonprofits Need to Know Before Embracing Gen AI.)
   
2. Your skills can erode. AI can help you skip the hard part of projects: The thinking. The understanding. The bringing it all together. You skate right past that stuff. And you can lose your ability to think clearly by yourself.
   
3. Accuracy problems. AI confidently makes stuff up. You’d fire a human who did that. AI just doesn’t know better. It forces you to vet everything, and that can be as much work as doing it yourself.
   
4. Ethical and legal concerns. Where does AI get all that stuff it “knows”? Usually from copyrighted intellectual property created by real people. It doesn’t get consent, and it doesn’t compensate original authors. In a sense, you may be plagiarizing — that is stealing — other people’s work.
   
5. Privacy and data security risks. When you give an AI tool donor information, internal strategy, or unpublished data, you don’t know where it goes. Many AIs keep input data for training the model. Then it can show up for someone else. Be sure to opt out of that or use enterprise-level controls.
   
6. Environmental impacts. AI models use significant energy. Boosting the cost of energy for everyone and contributing meaningfully to carbon emissions.
   
7. It’s more work than you think. Sloppy AI often creates more work fact-checking, rewriting, and editing. It basically pushes the work down the line and slow everything down.

I don’t have answers for any of these things. Maybe they’re inevitable. But we should be aware of what we’re doing when we use these tools.

More posts on AI and fundraising.

Over at Moceanic, we’ve built (and continue to refine) an AI fundraising tool. It’s called Copy Koala. It has a great track record of producing superb response in direct mail and email fundraising. It combines powerful training, smart input and prompting, and expert human editing. And the cost to use it is shockingly low. It might be right for your organization. If you have budget and the authority to spend it, consider setting up a quick online meeting with Sean Triner to see if Copy Koala might be right for you.