Ethical Use of AI in Fundraising Creative
Blog adapted from DMAW’s Creative Day presentation by Erica O’Brien, Fuse Fundraising Principal/Owner and Leigh Corrigan-Owens, Mal Warwick Donordigitial Creative Director
These days, all anyone can talk about is AI – the good, the bad, the ugly. Where can AI be used in fundraising? Should AI be used in fundraising?
AI may be utilized as a tool that boosts creativity, increases productivity, and improves performance. A few opportunities to possibly utilize AI include:
Ideating New Ideas: Ever stuck on where to begin when starting a new project? AI tools can be used to help us in these instances when the creative juices just aren’t flowing.
Optimizing Google Grant: Try asking an AI tool to help generate keywords and ad copy to enhance your Google Grant account and monitor the results – AI might have a few ideas you haven’t considered that could improve metrics.
Altering or Enhancing Imagery: Using an AI tool can bring a photo back to life by expanding the background on a cropped image to create a seamless, larger image. The same goes for removing components in photos that are ruining the shot or deterring from the main area of focus.
With such incredible advancements in technology happening at such a rapid pace, it’s critical to take the time to familiarize ourselves with these tools – and the ethical considerations behind them – before diving in headfirst.
Create Your Own AI Guidelines
The first step to take as an organization is deciding whether or not you will use AI tools. If yes, it’s important to ensure everyone is on the same page for how you will leverage the tools by constructing an outline with required guidelines for all teams to follow.
Developing an AI advisory team within your organization can help ensure ethical and responsible use of AI for your company. A variety of team members should be included to help shape the guidelines and stay on top of emerging trends.
Below are a few questions that your advisory team can use to start this process:
Do we want to use AI-generated images? Will we use AI-generated images of humans?
What checks and balances can we put in place to account for human oversight and fact-checking?
How can we protect our intellectual property and those of others?
How will we provide meaningful guidance to avoid potential bias?
AI Considerations in Fundraising
As you are developing your guidelines for using AI as an organization, it is critical to ensure these tools are being used ethically and there are many considerations to keep top of mind.
Prioritize Authenticity
If your organization wants to utilize AI imagery and content, donors can potentially question your trustworthiness if you are not transparent. With trust in nonprofits being a critical issue facing our industry, it is important to consider that leveraging AI tools may unintentionally exacerbate trust issues. If your organization intends to utilize AI, there are several steps you can take including clearly stating an image is AI-generated and is “representative” of a real situation instead of portraying it as fact or actual people.
Ensure Accuracy
One of the biggest takeaways we’ve learned from exploring AI tools is to always ensure human oversight. Engage in critical thinking, if something doesn’t seem right, it’s probably not, so never skip the step of fact checking when using AI. AI tools will tell you themselves that they are not perfect and will make mistakes. You can ask the AI tool to share their sources, and then follow up with your own research from reputable databases and websites to verify.
Protect Your Information
When you generate an image with AI, who owns that image? And what happens to the copy you input into an AI tool? While there are some complexities surrounding these questions as potential copyright issues loom, it’s important to be cautious and err on the side of caution. Remember to never input confidential information into AI services. Most AI tools don’t verify confidentiality or disclose the use of your data, though you may consider paying for premium tools that could better protect your information.
Be Aware of Biases
One primary challenge of utilizing AI for image and content generation is known biases, and potentially advancing historic narratives that represent a faulty reality at best. That is, the data feeding large AI tools are comprised of millions of datasets, many of which holding previous stereotypes around race, gender, ethnicity, etc. One way to counterbalance this challenge is significant human oversight, and careful selection of prompts (the information input into AI to generate a response). The more specific these prompts are in nature, the better chance the image is representative of an authentic landscape of people and places.
Dove has developed a helpful guide to aide users in their foray into AI. We found this playbook extremely helpful and we recommend reviewing this tool when imputing prompts into AI. See a few of their examples below, and notice how specific they are in their phrasing.
There’s no question that AI is here to stay. By learning how to safely and effectively use these tools, we can curate incredible content while facilitating ethical guidelines that are true to our missions.
If you have any questions on the ethical use of AI in fundraising, connect with us!