Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Nonprofit AI: Luddites, Environmental Impact Framework

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 51

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Carolyn Woodard covers a cultural moment that's been building quietly, resistance to AI among workers, young people, and nonprofits, and connects it to a research framework for thinking honestly about AI's real environmental costs and benefits. Both threads come back to the same core question: who benefits from AI, and on what terms?

This episode also introduces a three-lens approach to help nonprofits think through the environmental impact of their own AI use, and suggests why "I'm just against AI" may be a values signal worth listening to rather than a training problem to fix.

This episode covers:

  • The Summer of Ludd, an 8-day festival in New York City, and what the original Luddite movement was actually about: skilled workers organizing against technology being used to enrich owners at workers' expense.
  • Why some nonprofit staff, especially younger workers, are pushing back on AI, and why it's worth asking what's behind that resistance before trying to fix it.
  • Researcher Jennifer Turliuk's net climate impact framework, and her core observation: AI harms are measurable now, but most benefits are still speculative. Including as full a picture of the cons and pros will help organizations make thoughtful AI use decisions.
  • Three lenses for evaluating your own AI use: what you're asking AI to do, where you are, and how you will benefit from using the AI.
  • DC Public Library's free in-person "AI & Us" series focusing on "invisible" communities and AI.

Resources Mentioned:

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Carolyn Woodard

Hello and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Nonprofit AI Podcast, Midweek Check-In.

Carolyn Woodard

I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host. I am not an AI expert. I'm really interested in AI and in the impact that AI is having on nonprofits, both how we're using it at nonprofits and how it's impacting the work that we do in the communities that we care about.

Carolyn Woodard

So in this midweek podcast, every week I try to bring us a little bit of news, filtered through how this is going to impact nonprofits and philanthropy more broadly, and maybe answer some questions and give you some more resources that you can read and follow up on because it's hard with so much coming at us about AI every day. If you're reading about it, it's that big fire hose of information. So just trying to make it a little bit more manageable. So

Carolyn Woodard

Please get in touch with me if you have something you'd like to hear about or something you have a question about, you can reach me through our website, communityit.com, or here on the podcast. So

Carolyn Woodard

This week had a couple of resources and news stories that connect in this kind of odd way around a kind of cultural moment that is building, as we speak, a lot of resistance to AI among workers, young people, a lot of nonprofits. I'm seeing a lot on LinkedIn, and our clients at Community IT are also skeptical, and many are very resistant to using AI at all, or just very concerned about the power imbalance, the environmental impacts, and the impact on people and humanity for going to use the easy way out instead of writing our own essays or making our own art.

Carolyn Woodard

So I wanted to share a couple of resources with you this week about AI's real effect on climate costs and kind of a framework for how to think about that.

Carolyn Woodard

And also, yeah, this bigger question of resistance like, do you have to use AI? What if your company is telling you that you have to, or your organization has a policy and is expecting everyone to use AI? So

Carolyn Woodard

The first was this uh news story about an eight-day festival in New York City that I came across called The Summer of Ludd, which is uh feeding into the original Luddite movement. Um, there was a conference at the new school in New York on AI and surveillance. Uh there were, you know, other activities, kind of in real life activities at this festival. There were some concerts in real life music. Uh, none of it was advertised online. There were flyers, so it was very old school. They were pasted around the neighborhood in New York where this took place. And

Carolyn Woodard

I came across it through an NPR story about this festival, but also how the word Luddite, if you know it at all, is a political insult. It doesn't really relate to historically who the Luddites were.

Carolyn Woodard

So a little bit of a reframe of the history. Most people use Luddite as an insult or shorthand for someone who can't work a smartphone or who prefers analog to digital, who likes old school, who likes doing things with their hands, maybe arts and crafts that are not related to technology. Sometimes even it's used, you know, for technophobe, someone who's afraid of technology, just doesn't like it, doesn't want to use it.

Carolyn Woodard

But actual Luddites were skilled textile workers in 19th century England who, they weren't against technology. They knew what they were doing around the way the looms were working and the technology, these kind of early computers that were these reading cards that helps the loom do the work and make these very complicated patterns, which until then it was only a master weaver who would be able to, you know, handle this kind of complicated pattern. So they,

Carolyn Woodard

The Luddites originally were against the way technology was being implemented to enrich factory owners and lay off staff. So if you have an early computer running your looms, you don't need those master weavers anymore to set up the loom or, you know, think up the patterns. There's lots of new patterns that you can do. And really all you need is the one person who punches out the cards and then you put them in the loom machine and it makes the people, the children, still had to run the looms, but the design part of it was taken out of the hand of people and put in the hands of technology. And this was, you know,

Carolyn Woodard

The factory owners were thought this was a great idea. They could pay fewer people and they could just have the quote-unquote computer doing the setup.

Carolyn Woodard

And the people, of course, who were the crafts people who knew it was like their experience and their understanding of weaving that enabled people to make the computer program that would do the same thing that they could do, but cheaper because it was a computer instead.

Carolyn Woodard

So they petitioned, they marched, they organized, they had strikes, uh, they won some concessions, but the winner of history gets to describe the losers. So the fact that this term Luddites, they followed someone, you know, named Ludd. And so they were Luddites.

Carolyn Woodard

And at the time it was kind of the ruling class and the factory owners were afraid of the people power that was being developed by the followers of Ludd, the Luddites. And so in history, they insulted them. They said they were backward, they didn't want progress, they were afraid of the technology, and that is how it's come down to us now. I'll share some resources with you in the show notes.

Carolyn Woodard

If you want to go deeper into the history, uh, the book to read is Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant. And he makes this argument that the Luddite story is deliberately distorting that history by people in power who gain from us believing that anyone who is against technology doesn't understand technology or just doesn't know what the tool does, or like wasn't smart enough to be an investor, or you know, is unable to understand the technology and they're a Luddite because they want something different.

Carolyn Woodard

And so he's arguing for recapturing that term and that ethos of wanting technology to enhance humanity and to serve humanity instead of take over from humanity and lead to the wealth of a concentrated few people in power who were already wealthy. Uh, he does have a Substack as well. I'll put that in the show notes also.

Carolyn Woodard

So you may be seeing this in your own nonprofits. And so I just kind of pulled together some of these threads that we've been talking about over the past couple of months here, uh, especially younger staff. Uh, if you have teenagers in your house, college students, or young workers at your nonprofit, people in their 20s and 30s, particularly, are pushing back on AI in real tangible ways. And this is showing up in polling and some other research that's coming out about generational attitudes toward AI.

Carolyn Woodard

You've probably seen things about this as well, going to IRL in real life events like taking up knitting. There's like granny cool, uh granny hobbies that are coming back, spending time with people, especially after COVID and a lot of isolation with technology. A lot of younger people who came through that find it very important to make social connections to other people, to meet people, to find people who like your same hobbies. And you may have seen articles about using dumb phones or apps on your phone that can manage how addictive they are, how much you're using them, and you know, make you go outside and touch grass.

Carolyn Woodard

You may have staff in this age group or in other areas, I mean, it's not just young people. There are plenty of other people who are also deeply skeptical about AI and about technology.

Carolyn Woodard

So you may have people who say, you know, they're just not going to use it. And if you're tempted to see that as a training problem that you can quote unquote fix, it might be worth it at your organization or in your family to go a little bit deeper and ask some more probing questions. What are they saying? Where is this coming from? And what, you know, what's behind it?

Carolyn Woodard

Are they against AI for specific reasons? Are they concerned about who benefits and on what terms? A lot of people want to live their values. So they don't want to shop at a place that they don't agree with. They don't want to go to a restaurant that maybe has a policy stand that they don't agree with. They want to try where possible, and it can be uh it can be difficult to do this completely. Um, but you will meet young people, idealistic people, kind of people who work at nonprofits, who are really don't want to participate in something that they don't agree with. So they may be having that reaction to AI. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

If you are a local person, I'm gonna stick a plug-in here of an amazing event that I read about in DC. The DC Public Library uh has is running a three-part series this month called AI and Us. How is AI impacting DC and what we can do about it? And their tagline is overwhelmed by AI. They're talking about building power among communities that are affected by AI, experiment and build connections, in real life connections to each other.

Carolyn Woodard

And they're really focused on marginalized, uh, underserved, and what they're calling invisible communities. So many communities that we care about as nonprofits that are really being impacted by AI, but aren't part of policy making, aren't part of, you know, contacting their elected representatives, maybe don't totally know what AI is, need some AI literacy. So really interesting series. If you're in DC, I'll share that link with you. It's at the public library. And uh

Carolyn Woodard

This Thursday, July 16th, Dr. Nicole Turner Lee from Brookings Institution is going to be speaking about AI equity. And she wrote the book Digitally Invisible, which if you haven't read it, I urge you to. It's amazing.

Carolyn Woodard

If you're not in DC, I would say look around. You may have a similar uh lecture series or you know, webinars or local government, local organizations, non-government organizations who are interested in this and trying to build AI literacy, not just around the data centers, which there's a lot of that happening too, we've been talking about, but around the power imbalance, the AI literacy, the impact on communities, and particularly the impact on workforce. Um, and just the using our data.

Carolyn Woodard

Like this is all stuff that we put on the internet about ourselves that then just got sucked up and monetized, basically. So these conversations are happening everywhere. Uh, show up in person. That's what this movement is all about.

Carolyn Woodard

And this is really a bipartisan issue, demanding AI governance around data centers, around worker protections, around humanity-oriented AI. I wouldn't say it's uniting the parties in the United States, but it's definitely not something that's only in a fringe. There are very mainstream and centrist uh representatives and organizations that are also very concerned about the growth of AI. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

We covered it in this UN report that came out last week, the Papal Encyclical that we talked about a month or so ago, local zoning fights over data centers in you know, some very posh neighborhoods, so people are getting involved in those as well. If you've been to any of these zoning meetings, a lot of them are getting, you know, 200% turnout, have to be in the overflow room. So uh, you know, that's maybe a sign.

Carolyn Woodard

Keep getting involved. Uh, people power is really changing. There are some more moratoriums coming online in different states and counties, even. Uh in Virginia, where I am in Northern Virginia, where there are so many data centers, there's a real movement around limiting them. So, People Power works. Uh, you want to get involved. It's uh fairly easy. Look around in your own location for groups that you can join.

Carolyn Woodard

So, one Luddite critique of AI is about its environmental cost. And we've talked about that a lot, and it's a very legitimate concern. I'm not downplaying it for anyone. But as I've said several times, the picture from people in the environmental movement and conservation movement who use technology, there is a lot of, it's a lot more complicated. It's not just AI is bad for the climate end of story, black and white. So

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to share a research framework that I came across recently that is a way to help think through technology and climate, technology and AI and environment and conservation. So Jennifer Turliuk is a researcher, climate tech investor, and lecturer at MIT and Harvard. She is very well known in AI circles around this particular focus on environment. She wrote her MIT thesis on the net climate impact of AI, one of the first frameworks to look at both sides of the ledger. She's done a couple different TED talks. You can find her on YouTube. I will include some links to her work in the show notes.

Carolyn Woodard

But her core argument is that most of the conversation right now around environmental impacts focuses on costs only. And costs are very real. Global electricity demand from data centers is expected to more than double by 2030, four years from now. And it will be roughly the same energy consumption of the country of Japan. About 60% of that increased demand is predicted to be met by fossil fuels. So that's an increase in fossil fuels. Well, we're been spending a couple of decades now trying to decrease fossil fuel use.

Carolyn Woodard

Most people only count that operational carbon, so burning the fossil fuels, running the servers, and they don't also include the emissions from the buildings, from the generators that are being used in Northern Virginia, at least and in other parts of the country and around the world. When there isn't enough electricity on the grid, they will set up diesel generators, very stinky, noisy, and polluting. And then there's also emissions from building. So just you know, grinding up the concrete and all of the stuff that goes into building the data centers creates emissions, uh, which is bad for the environment and bad for pollution, bad for the neighborhoods.

Carolyn Woodard

Turliuk makes the point that AI also has potential climate benefits. And so her framework tries to include those all of the cons and also include any pros that are out there. And so some of the pros that she's talked about are optimizing energy grids. So that's something that AI is really pretty good at doing, seeing the patterns and predicting when there'll be a lot of demand on the system and you know, feeding lots of inputs into it and then managing the system better. Of course, uh, also AI can do a good job of predicting solar and wind output if you have alternative energy sources, um, predictive maintenance on green infrastructure. Uh, you could use AI to help speed up permitting for renewable projects. You can use AI, you know,

Carolyn Woodard

So there are lots of ways that AI could be useful in um decreasing the energy use of the data centers and of AI itself.

Carolyn Woodard

The problem is that right now those costs are very concrete and immediate, and the benefits are largely potential. As she puts it, AI harms are measurable, but most benefits are still speculative.

Carolyn Woodard

So if you're interested in checking out her net climate impact score framework, it's not a simple calculator. So you can't just put in, I want to use this AI to do this prompt and I live in this place. How much does it cost? Uh it doesn't work like that, although that would be a great tool to have, although it's very complicated, but something else that AI could help us with. Um, but

Carolyn Woodard

Her framework, uh, it's a way to think through and weigh both sides of deploying AI for a given use case. Uh, it's useful, like governments are using it, can use it. I will share the link to it in the show notes. If you work at an environmental nonprofit, you may already be aware of this. But

Carolyn Woodard

If you want to go deeper on it, she also has a cohort coming up in August, August 6th through 27th. It's you get a certificate at the end of it. It's uh $999. So it's not free, it's run through Maven, which is an online, you know, certification adult education professional development um platform. Uh, but it's a chance to, you know, work with this amazing um, you know, she's on the forefront of thinking about this specific aspect. So you could have a class with um Jennifer Tuliak, and um, you know, it's professional development specifically designed for climate and sustainability professionals.

Carolyn Woodard

So if you are at a nonprofit that works in an environment, if you know somebody that you know could take this class and benefit from it from the certification, I will definitely share that link with you if you're interested.

Carolyn Woodard

A question comes up a lot. Uh, how do I know which AI uses are having a high environmental cost? And are there any uses of AI that are quote unquote okay that have a lower environmental impact?

Carolyn Woodard

And we've said before, you know, the companies make it pretty opaque. It's difficult to tell exactly what your prompt in your area is costing. I mean, even for pricing, they are not very transparent on what your usage is, what's a token, and is there like surge pricing, or you know, how are you being charged for this? So that's a totally different related piece of the problem. But

Carolyn Woodard

I find it helpful to think through three different lenses about your AI use and make your own decisions. Like I keep saying, we have agency. So you can opt out entirely 100%. And that is a valid reaction.

Carolyn Woodard

But if you're curious about using AI and thinking about using it in a way that feels okay to yourself, uh, one question to ask is what are you asking your AI to do? Not all AI use carries the same footprint. Text-based tasks like drafting an email, summarizing a meeting, analyzing, you know, asking it questions are relatively light. You know, asking Claude to do some web-based research for you or draft an article for you is um, you know, something you would probably be using that energy in some way, anyway, if you're doing your own uh web, you know, looking online for something, if you're Googling something, it's going through a data center.

Carolyn Woodard

So text-based, you know, these are large language models, they're based on text, and the way they, you know, utilize the what they know, how they learn, how quickly they go to the data center, the packets that they come back with, the usage that you're getting charged for, that is all kind of like in their wheelhouse and is a very light application. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

Image generation, video generation is one of the most energy intensive uses for consumers, common people like us. Training a model is uh also a very heavy use of electricity and the AI. So using AI isn't just one thing.

Carolyn Woodard

And you may have a project where you use it intensively to code something, but that's a one-time use for a couple of days or a week. And then after your agent is coded or your project is enabled or your skill has been created, your gem is working and functional, uh, then you you aren't coding it anymore. You're just using it. And so you're kind of migrated back into the lighter use of AI. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

So that's one thing to think about. What are you using AI to do?

Carolyn Woodard

And that may be something that your organization is going to look at putting in your policy. Like we don't use AI to generate images, but we do use it to summarize meetings. And we feel okay with the environmental impact that those different making that judgment call, uh, which is Okay, and which do we not do? Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Another question to ask yourself is where are you? So we talked about this before, but most people don't know very well the carbon intensity of the electricity grid that you're on varies enormously by your location and by the time of day and by what else is going on. So if you're in the middle of a heat dome like we are having in the United States right now, that heat stress is going to make the electricity grid more stressed right when the data centers are trying to use that electricity too. So

Carolyn Woodard

I could see in the future this becoming something more like you know, minutes used to be on your data plan for your cell phone, that uh nonprofits would feel better about doing these more intensive tasks overnight, you know, when a lot of other people aren't using the electricity grid. So that's something to think about. Um, you don't control which data center your query goes to.

Carolyn Woodard

You can ask vendors about their renewable energy commitments. You can think about where you're sited, like what state are you in, and how is their electricity grid? How is their policy regulation? Are they a highly regulated state? Do they have lots of renewable energy? Uh are they a state where it's people with a solar panel on their house can sell that back to the grid? Uh in Virginia, we cannot do that. We can you can have a solar panel, but it doesn't that doesn't give you it, you can't sell it back to other people to be able to use it yet. Another thing to lobby about. But um, you know,

Carolyn Woodard

It's something to think about and to build into your organization's individual AI acceptable use policy, right? You might be an organization working on the environment in a drought-stricken water poor area of the state or the country or just your town where your physical address is, and you decide for that reason you aren't going to use AI because it's gonna put a lot of stress on, you know, data centers are being built in places that they shouldn't be built near you.

Carolyn Woodard

You may be working in a location that has a lot of water and has a lot of renewables and has a lot of regulation. And so you might feel more okay as an organization living your values using AI in that situation. So, again, it's gonna be really individualized to you. If you have a lot of people working remotely, you know, maybe that's something you want to talk about as an organization as well. What is the acceptable AI use uh for your staff who work remotely based on where they are? Um

Carolyn Woodard

In Turliuk's framework, she also asks us to think about what's on the other side of the ledger. So you've thought about what are you going to use it for? A light thing or a heavier thing that takes a lot more energy, a lot more AI use. You've thought about the electricity grid, where are you, the environment, where are you?

Carolyn Woodard

Turliuk also wants us to take into account those pros, right? To in addition to the cons and think about that offset. So if there is a potential benefit of your use of AI, you need to think about that and calculate that into your calculation, basically.

Carolyn Woodard

So if you are drafting a grant to fund a smart grid project and you're using AI to do it in a you know efficient way, um, that's a different calculation than generating some AI art for your gala invitation or for a LinkedIn post, for example, making a cute little video that is about something that's so ephemeral on social media.

Carolyn Woodard

So that might also be something you want to build into your policy and think about and talk about as an organization with your values in mind. So you don't have to do this kind of deep thought about every prompt, and you don't need to feel guilty about using AI to help manage your inbox, for example. You know, productivity tools that you're using are also, you know, usually pretty light ask of the AI.

Carolyn Woodard

But it's worth asking for your policy as a mission-based organization. Is your AI policy aligned with that mission, with the communities that you care about? Uh, or is it just something that's convenient?

Carolyn Woodard

Is it something like you might want to have a talk with the all staff about if it's something that you can do, like putting something on your Asana, for example, or your Monday, um, you could ask your AI to do it for you. But you know, if that's sending a packet out to the data center and getting it back and doing it, um, if it's something that you can just pop over and plop it in yourself and you're done, like that wasn't something you used to do and you're able to do.

Carolyn Woodard

Maybe you want to think more about using AI for the things that you can't do easily and offsetting that use by doing things yourself where it makes sense, where it would just be like, why would I ask AI to do that? I can just do it. So, another way to think about it. So, trying to keep in mind those pros, the things that you're using, the benefits of your using of AI. You know,

Carolyn Woodard

Maybe you are using AI to um handle part of three other people's jobs that you're doing at your nonprofit because you're chronically understaffed. That's a valid way to use AI and reach more people. Like your mission is to serve more people, and you can do that because AI is helping you with some of these day-to-day tasks or productivity tasks, then build that into your calculations. You have a benefit.

Carolyn Woodard

You will probably still have people who say, I'm just against AI, I don't want to learn about it, I don't want to use it, it's terrible for the planet, and I'm just very upset about it. Um, and those are the people who really care about these kinds of questions, like that have a lot of nuance to them. It's not irrational to be worried about and afraid of and in opposition to AI. Um, the original Luddites weren't against technology, they were against their technology being stolen from them and used against them.

Carolyn Woodard

So in 2026, I think that's a good thought to leave us with about how it's implemented, who benefits, and you know, can we use this to make the world better? And how involved do we need to be in real life to ensure that those policies and regulations and human-focused AI become reality? So

Carolyn Woodard

I want to remind you we do have a template for an AI acceptable use policy. It's at our site, communityit.com. I'll include that in the show notes. Again, it's you can't just download it and use it. You do have to customize it and make it individual to your organization.

Carolyn Woodard

And some of these questions you're gonna have to think about just even individually to yourself. What do you feel comfortable with using AI for and why? And share that with your colleagues. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

You can find us on Reddit at r slash nonprofit IT Management. We have a webinar this week, tomorrow. It's on an AI maturity model for nonprofits. Um, so if you are at a nonprofit that's been using AI for a while, a lot of the material out there is for beginners. So this is a webinar that's gonna talk about kind of next steps, how to really deeply integrate AI into what your nonprofit does. We have some experts who are gonna be with us talking about some case studies and real life experience that they've had. If you're interested in that, please join us. You can still register. It'll be tomorrow on Wednesday.

Carolyn Woodard

And then I'll be back here on Friday with some more nonprofit uh podcasts and next Tuesday with some more nonprofit AI. So until then, take care.