AI: What every nonprofit leader should know

Generative AI technologies (like ChatGPT) consume 100-1,000 times more energy than traditional digital services. GenAI also presents concerns about exploitative labor practices, security vulnerabilities, and effects on human relationships. Nonprofits ought to consider and acknowledge how the use of GenAI conflicts with their mission, vision, and values. To address impact, leaders should 1) limit AI use to essential tasks, 2) disclose when AI is used, and 3) request transparency from providers about environmental and ethical impacts.

--
As a consultant and coach with over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, I believe having an GenAI ethics framework serves multiple purposes for mission-driven people and organizations:

As a consultant and coach with over 20 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, I believe having an GenAI ethics framework serves multiple purposes for mission-driven people and organizations:
​

• Practical Resource Management: Nonprofits typically operate with limited resources which make time-saving AI tools attractive. 
• Mission Alignment: Ethics are central to most any nonprofit. This framework provides guidance on how AI usage often conflicts with core organizational values and purposes.
• Risk Management: By understanding AI's potential pitfalls, leaders can better protect their organizations from unintended consequences of adoption.
• Strategic Planning Support: This information provides context for how technology decisions might be integrated into long-term organizational planning.

Our Ethical Obligation"Ethics refers to standards and practices that tell us how human beings ought to act in the many situations in which they find themselves," according to the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. When it comes to AI, we all share an ethical obligation to consider the social and environmental impacts of these powerful tools.

This obligation is particularly urgent because AI systems remain largely underregulated, with far-reaching consequences that often remain hidden from public view. Companies aren't always required to be transparent about how their AI systems work or the impacts they create. Yet every choice we make regarding AI—whether as developers, organizations implementing AI solutions, or everyday users—has real-world effects that deserve our attention.

Understanding the Impact of AIIn her talk to the Rotary Club of San Jose on March 19, 2025, Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, highlighted several key areas to be concerned about AI:

• Information Integrity: AI systems can generate "hallucinations" or false information with confidence, creating a false sense of security for users. 
• Human Labor Behind the Curtain: AI requiring significant human effort or "taskers" - people around the world categorizing photos and generating text to train AI systems. Many taskers work long hours for minimal pay.
• Security Concerns: There are hackers disguising malicious inputs and malware as legitimate prompts. With the right prompt, a hacker can trick GenAI tools into forwarding private documents, stealing sensitive data, and even take over systems and devices.
• Social Impact: Millions of people now spend as much as 12 hours daily interacting with AI chatbots, raising questions about what this might do to human relationships and social development.
• Environmental Consequences: The training and operation of AI systems require enormous computational resources, leading to significant water usage for cooling data centers (measured in liters per search). This has become a local issue in places like the City of Santa Clara, which hosts approximately 50 data centers consuming 60% of the region's energy.

What You Can DoThe most obvious step is to limit your use of resource-intensive AI features to only essential tasks. If you don't need to use AI, don't. If you do use AI, be transparent about it. Disclosing AI use helps raise awareness about responsible consumption and encourages others to consider their own usage.

The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics also suggests several concrete steps we can take:

1. Use an ethical decision-making framework: Their framework involves identifying ethical issues, gathering facts, evaluating alternative actions through different ethical lenses (rights, justice, utilitarian, common good, virtue, and care ethics), choosing an option, and reflecting on outcomes.
2. Demand more information: Contact the AI suppliers of the tools you use and ask about the environmental footprint of their systems, how they ensure fairness and prevent bias, and what human oversight exists.
3. Collective engagement: Engage with others in your field facing similar challenges, share best practices and lessons learned, support communities focused on ethical AI.
4. Advocate for regulation: Push for regulations that protect people and the environment. Support transparency requirements for AI systems.
5. Education: Help educate others about the impacts of AI. Promote critical thinking about AI claims and capabilities.

We need to act now to establish ethical frameworks for AI development and use. Like other technologies that have transformed society, AI offers tremendous potential for good, but realizing that potential requires conscious choices and ethical frameworks. By approaching AI with the same ethical consideration we bring to other aspects of our lives, we can help ensure these powerful tools serve humanity's best interests.

Sources: Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, "A Framework for Ethical Decision Making," 2024; Irina Raicu, Director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, remarks on Ethics and AI, 2025; Rogers, R. "AI's Energy Demands Are Out of Control. Welcome to the Internet's Hyper-Consumption Era." WIRED, July 11, 2024.

AI was used in the writing of this article.