You don’t have to perpetually be online lately to know about, and perhaps be embroiled in, difficult-to-navigate conversation around generative artificial intelligence [Gen AI].
A note: While it has become common to refer to Gen AI under the larger AI umbrella, we’re going to avoid doing so here so as to be clear about the effects of generative AI on society, and for the purposes of this article, philanthropic and social justice environments.
Chat GPT and the likes started off – in the perspective of those in the general public at least – as a weird new internet tool that some of your internet friends and followers were using to generate recipes using the almost-too-old vegetables in their fridges, to create summaries of long texts or to turn photographs into cartoon-like illustrations. Many of us may have been intrigued, if not perplexed by this seemingly new little invention. But that novelty and that innocent intrigue have worn off quite fast and this technology has turned into one of our most pressing concerns. Pressing because the effects of Gen AI are continuously being shown to span a vast amount of social life – including on the environment, intellectual property, the right to knowledge, security and surveillance, literacy, human capacity and creativity, job security and more.
If we were to listen to Big Tech, they would have us believe the following about about the reach and impact of Gen AI:
- That Gen AI is going to give humanity its time back. That by taking care of all the menial tasks like writing, and summarising and synthesizing, we will get our time back to be creative, and to live our lives with more purpose and joy.
- That the proliferation of Gen AI into human social life is inevitable, or even more so that it’s already happened. So embrace it or get left behind.
What is emerging, however, is that Gen AI is proving to be extraordinarily destructive for the environment and human beings alike. As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it in their book ‘End Times Facism and the fight for the living world’: Large-scale generative AI is in a completely different league from Silicon Valley’s previous disruptions, bubbles, and booms. It’s not about connecting us, or making it easier to work from home, or to get sushi without speaking to anyone. This is a technology that has the potential to disrupt not only whole industries and lifestyles but the nature of life as we understand it.
While the evidence for why we should be cautious of Gen AI and its continued use is quite hefty already, it’s not difficult to understand why many of us may still reach for it. We live in a capitalist society that encourages and often rewards productivity over rest; quantity over quality; outcomes over process; short, sharp narratives over longer nuanced, context specific paragraphs etc. And in the world of social justice organising and movement building where there are never enough resources, time or people to do the work, a tool to help streamline admin tasks and spend less time in the ‘back office’ and more time on the ‘frontlines’ can feel invaluable.
The thing is, that kind of time saving, labour reducing, and income generating resource is necessary. But that kind of resource should already exist – and the philanthropic sector should be a part of it.
Philanthropy should be among the infrastructures or tools saving movements time, reducing labour and generating income – all without decimating the environment, stealing the intellectual property and data of activists, burning their resources or self generating the future without anyone’s consent.
Feminist grantmakers and intermediaries, through, for example, participatory grantmaking methodologies have been building the infrastructure that can, and in many ways already does, make AI obsolete in grantmaking.
How feminist participatory grantmaking does what Gen AI can’t
Feminist participatory grantmaking is anti-capitalist
Philanthropy was born of and necessitated by capitalism. Feminist grantmakers understand, however, that for feminist grantmaking to meaningfully partner and be in solidarity with social justice movements, our mechanisms for redistributing resources cannot replicate the conditions of philanthropy’s origins.
Anti-capitalist grantmaking can look like prioritising activist’s wellbeing in the grantmaking mechanism. At FRIDA, for example, this meant designing a grantmaking mechanism that, from the outset, aims to limit the amount of time and energy that goes into applying for the grant. This comes with the understanding that the actual writing of the proposal or report is the last step in a long list of activities that activists go through before they commit their hopes, plans, expertise and analyses to language.
Anti-capitalist grantmaking also looks like intentionally earmarking resources for collective care. In the Putting Out Fires Till We Burn Out report, the Urgent Action Fund shows how collective care is essential infrastructure for feminist movements to sustain activism in the face of rising political violence and shrinking civic space.
Feminist participatory grantmaking understands and privileges nuance and context specificity
Capitalist and Western standards, and therefore by extension Gen AI, privilege ‘objectivity’, generalisation, hegemony and broad pictures over smaller context/details – they privilege sameness. If everything and everyone is generally the same we can save time and money creating standardized solutions.
But feminist grantmakers understand that difference, details and context are not barriers to social justice, instead they are the very vehicles for it. FRIDA’s participatory grantmaking mechanism, for example, functions in a way that elevates the knowledge and expertise of young feminist collectives, over generalized understandings or notions about particular groups.
This way of understanding or thinking about expertise or whose knowledge counts as expertise comes directly from feminist movements that teach us that institutions and systems cannot know what is best or works better for specific communities, than they themselves can. To this degree FRIDA works with members of the Global Advisory Committee to set regional priorities and to reach the young feminists of those regions. During the voting process that follows the call for applications, it is fellow applicants [and members of the Global Advisory Committee] themselves that review and vote for which young feminist groups from their region will receive FRIDA funding.
[to read more about FRIDA’s Call for Applications, Global Advisory Committee, the voting process and FRIDAs participatory grantmaking mechanism at large, read the Resourcing Connections report here]
Feminist participatory grantmaking understands and privileges nuance and context specificity
Capitalist and Western standards, and therefore by extension Gen AI, privilege ‘objectivity’, generalisation, hegemony and broad pictures over smaller context/details – they privilege sameness. If everything and everyone is generally the same we can save time and money creating standardized solutions.
But feminist grantmakers understand that difference, details and context are not barriers to social justice, instead they are the very vehicles for it. FRIDA’s participatory grantmaking mechanism, for example, functions in a way that elevates the knowledge and expertise of young feminist collectives, over generalized understandings of particular groups.
This way of understanding or thinking about expertise or whose knowledge counts as expertise comes directly from feminist movements that teach us that institutions and systems cannot know what is best or works better for specific communities, than they themselves can. To this degree FRIDA works with members of the Global Advisory Committee to set regional priorities and to reach the young feminists of those regions. During the voting process that follows the call for applications, it is fellow applicants [and members of the Global Advisory Committee] that review and vote for which young feminist groups from their region will receive FRIDA funding.
[to read more about FRIDA’s Call for Applications, Global Advisory Committee, the voting process and FRIDAs participatory grantmaking mechanism at large, read the Resourcing Connections report here]
Feminist participatory grantmaking does not privilege western and white-supermacist ways of knowing, being and doing
Because Gen AI content is machine generated and we can sometimes view machines as more rational and logical than human beings, it has been assumed that AI produced content and/or decisions are more sound, more accurate and therefore less biased. But more recently studies have found that AI produced material does in fact show bias based on gender, race and other characteristics. Which makes sense given that Gen AI generates its material pulling on human made content spanning the width and breath of the internet. And, unfortunately, the internet is not yet the feminist, social justice utopia we wish it was. The internet is full of gender, racial and other kinds of biases and this is the same bias Gen AI then uses to synthesise information.
Similarly to how feminist grantmaking avoids replicating the conditions of capitalism, it also avoids replicating the conditions that elevate racism, sexism, classism, ableism, casteism, transphobia and homophobia.
For example, FRIDA generally supports groups based in the Global Majority. Historically the Global Minority has been turned to for ‘expertise’, with Western organisations receiving the bulk in funding to help to find solutions for ‘problems originating from the Global South’. This has looked like funders awarding grants to organisations that speak a certain way ie. ‘good English’, that prioritise certain kinds of data, ie. quantitative over qualitative, and that can explain change in a way that allows the funder to see ‘more bang for their buck’.
FRIDA intentionally prioritises knowledge and expertise from marginalised groups and peoples’ themselves, in their own voice, foregrounding their own ways of knowing, understanding and making sense of the world around them. All the while expanding space for groups to fashion their own solutions that are in alignment to their own contexts. Which is not something Gen AI can do.
Feminist participatory grantmaking elevates the doing, not the extracting
As we’ve touched on already, Gen AI can be so attractive to social justice movements, and in fact most people on the planet, who have too much to do without nearly enough time or resources to do it. Grant management can prove especially laborious when groups have to fill out long application forms to receive [any size] grant, build entirely new administrative or financial mechanisms to meet a funder’s criteria or spend hours writing detailed narrative and financial reports using templates that aren’t quite capable of capturing the breath or nuance of a group’s work.
An important part of what distinguishes feminist grantmakers is the consideration of activists time and labour. As far as possible feminist grantmakers produce short and succinct application forms, provide easy[ier] to use financial templates and give groups the space to speak about change, impact, challenges and successes in ways that do not force activist’s narratives into narrow boxes of change, learning, or cause and effect.
In an article titled ‘Reflections from the back office: Why the middle matters’ FRIDA Finance Manager Min Zhu wrote “Through FRIDA’s participatory grantmaking process, staff across the entire organization have opportunities to review applications from regions we know or identify with. Reading these applications, I was struck by how much grassroots organizations carry. Many of them are run by small teams. The same people facilitating workshops are also writing proposals, managing finances, answering donor questions, coordinating volunteers, and keeping the organization running. That was when I realized accessibility is not only about who receives funding. It’s also about how much work it takes just to access it.”
Social justice movements are quite literally carrying the world on their backs. What they deserve are communities of solidarity to ease as much of the burden as we can – not Big Tech fashioned solutions that threaten their homes, environments, labour, data and privacy.
