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- MeenahKhosraw
Microsoft
Thanks for joining our Future of AI for Nonprofits AMA! We appreciate your questions and feedback—and look forward to continuing the discussion in the Nonprofit Community!
- Hi! I am Valeria Babără, Legal and Advocacy Officer with Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice, an NGO based in The Hague (The Netherlands) working to advance gender justice with the International Criminal Court and other justice mechanisms. As I started introducing AI to my team and our partners, I receive a lot of feedback about the adverse effects of AI and how it risks increasing inequality, replicating bias etc. Most of the research recently issued in our international criminal law field on AI-related themes similarly focuses on negative aspects. While I believe it is important to be mindful of potential negative consequences, I feel that these efforts are not proportional to the efforts of providing access to AI resources. In other words, we will soon have a lot of research criticizing AI tools and initiatives before many actors have had a chance to learn what they are, let alone experience working with them. Any thoughts on how to navigate this? How to encourage colleagues to also be open to AI opportunities and potential?
- I love this question Valeria, because its a common concern in a lot of circles. The way I like to think about it, is that each and every one of us has the ability to shape the narrative for how we use AI in our society. There will definitely be bad actors looking to make use of AI for their own personal gains, but we should all demand a seat at the table to shape the direction of this. So while the fears are justified, what I fear more is people not engaging in AI to define the course it needs to take. And all the items you raised, around bias in the data, increasing risk inequality, etc are all real but there are steps we can take to address them, we just have to be intentional about these risks as we develop solutions - and that intentionality should force changes in the entire product development lifecycle for any product you are building. It increases the cost/time of developing safe products, but it’s necessary.
- Great question, Valeria. I think your instinct here is the right one! One suggestion for navigating this is to help your team avoid lumping all of these topics into a single conversation. By that I mean, we can interrogate and be mindful of risks, while still becoming familiar with the tools in other lower stakes contexts. To take an example from your field, AI as a tool to develop sentencing guidelines should be heavily scrutinized. AI as a tool to help your team dramatically accelerate their capacity for document review is an entirely different context (and likely something they would be quite excited about!)
- mibradyTaking a look at this framework of responsible AI may also help in framing your approach to leveraging AI. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/responsible-ai
- KatelynnCWhitaker
"...If we have a conversation about building an ethical society designed by AI....That gives me a lot of hope." So many great insights from Vilas Dhar! What are some of your favorite moments from this conversation?
- Kim_Brooks_MSPI really appreciated Vilas Dhar's analogy of social media - if we had created social media with more intent and foresight, we could have avoided the pitfalls we're seeing now. He cuts right to the core question of ethics and AI: "What are we designing for?" How would you answer that question - either for yourself, AI as a whole? or your organization?
- Hi all, Nick Cain here from the Patrick J McGovern Foundation (PJMF). I lead the Strategic Grants team. Looking forward to answering any questions you may have!
- Kim_Brooks_MSPThe video is now added here: Hit refresh as needed to get access. Thanks for your patience. Please add your questions here as the conversation progresses. Thank you!
- Margaret_FarmerGreetings! I am Margaret Farmer, a Customer Success Manager with Microsoft's Nonprofit Tech Acceleration Program. If you have any inquiries regarding Microsoft 365 Licenses, feel free to reach out.
- mibradyHi Margaret! Would you mind reaching out to Susan below to answer some of her questions?
- Hi I'm Susan from TechSoup. I was wondering when nonprofits should decide that they should opt for a paid version of a generative AI tool versus a free one? What are the differences and how do nonprofits make that decision? Also - how do you load a large doc into a generative AI tool and get a result? For ex, entering an article in and getting a presentation back from the tool?
- Margaret_FarmerRegarding your question about handling a large document in the free version of Copilot with Bing, you can upload the file and then request a summary of the document.
- Its a great question Susan! Paid versions typically will have more features/functions/abilities then their respective free versions. At PJMF, we typically start by doing some simple prototyping with the free versions and move to the paid version as we incorporate the LLM in our products. Typically that will support faster response times, higher capacity (ie: token size, etc), etc. In regards to your second question, most of the newer versions of these LLM's now have mulimodal support (https://openai.com/research/gpt-4, https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/models-overview). This allows you the ability to now feed in docs, and depending on the use case, generated appropriate responses. At PJMF, we utilize this feature in one of our latest products that's designed to allow funders to perform financial due diligence on nonprofit financial statements (as a part of their risk assessment). We feed the financial docs directly as context to the LLM, and is able to parse through and pull out the necessary financial data points, quite accurately I may add.
- Margaret_FarmerHello Susan, Depending on what the organization is trying to accomplish the free version is similar to the copilot in Bing where you get basics prompts and at no cost. However, if they are looking to get the integrations into Microsoft 365 applications they will need to convert to the paid option.
- thanks, this is helpful. If I were to put the content, like an outline, into a generative AI tool and ask it to make a presentation in power point from the outline, how would that work and would it be free or would it cost to do this?
- Kim_Brooks_MSPThanks for joining the AMA! The video of the Vilas Dhar conversation will launch shortly. Stay tuned!
- MeenahKhosraw
Welcome to the Future of AI for Nonprofits Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)! Enjoy the premiere of the Fireside Chat with Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Kate Behncken, CVP of Microsoft Philanthropies, at the Global Nonprofits Leaders Summit. This live hour gives you the opportunity to ask questions to the engineering and product team. Introduce yourself by replying to this thread. Post new questions in the Comment on this event… box above.
- ShabnamMohammadiHello, my name is Shabnam and I am Power Platform/Dynamics specialist with Microsoft's Nonprofit Tech Acceleration Program. Looking forward to supporting you with your questions.
- rtripuraniHi everyone, I am Radhika, Azure specialist from the Microsoft NTA team. Looking forward to supporting you with your questions.
- Hi everyone, Hazem Mahmoud here from the Patrick J McGovern Foundation (PJMF). I lead the Data Solutions team at PJMF where we focus on building data and AI products for the social good sector. Looking forward to answering any questions you may have!
