Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell

Leveraging AI for Nonprofits with Joshua Peskay

• Julia Campbell • Episode 72

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This episode is sponsored by RoundTable Technology - the Nonprofit IT Partner. On January 26, they are offering a free webinar on the exact steps required to secure and protect your nonprofit IT in the New Year. RoundTable Technology is a managed IT and cybersecurity services organization focusing on the nonprofit sector, with over 200 nonprofit clients. Head over to NonprofitIT.com/best-ever to save your seat now.

Maybe you've heard of chatbots, the Lensa app (for all those futuristic selfies filling up your feed), or even played around with ChatGBT. AI is one of the fastest growing technologies of our time, and nonprofits need to start paying attention. 

My guest this week is Joshua Peskay, 3CPO (CIO, CISO & CPO) at RoundTable Technology. Joshua has spent the better part of three decades helping nonprofit organizations make better use of technology in support of their missions. In addition to leading RoundTable’s security team and providing vCIO services to numerous organizations,  Joshua is a national leader in helping improve cybersecurity in the nonprofit sector. 

We discuss:

  • The benefits of AI for nonprofits
  • How to use this powerful tech to grow our audience
  • Pitfalls to avoid when using AI
  • Josh's favorite AI tools
  • Where to start, especially if you are a small shop

Learn more about RoundTable Technology:

Connect with Joshua: 

About Julia Campbell, the host of the Nonprofit Nation podcast:

Named as a top thought leader by Forbes and BizTech Magazine, Julia Campbell (she/hers) is an author, coach, and speaker on a mission to make the digital world a better place.

She wrote her book, Storytelling in the Digital Age: A Guide for Nonprofits, as a roadmap for social change agents who want to build movements using engaging digital storytelling techniques. Her second book, How to Build and Mobilize a Social Media Community for Your Nonprofit, was published in 2020 as a call-to-arms for mission-driven organizations to use the power of social media to build movements.

Julia’s online courses, webinars, and keynote talks have helped hundreds of nonprofits make the shift to digital thinking and how to do effective marketing in the digital age.

Take Julia’s free nonprofit masterclass,  3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Th

Take my free masterclass: 3 Must-Have Elements of Social Media Content that Converts

Julia Campbell  0:00   

Cybersecurity seemed like a terrifying topic we'll have no fear. This episode is sponsored by round table technology, the nonprofit it partner. And for the seventh year in a row, they're offering a free webinar to teach you and your staff exactly the steps to make your it more secure in the new year. Round Table technology is a managed it and cybersecurity services organization, focusing almost exclusively on the nonprofit sector with over 200 nonprofit clients. So make it your New Year's resolution to get your entire staff free cybersecurity awareness training, head on over to non profit it.com forward slash best dash ever to save your seat now. And here's to a wonderful 2023 Hello, and welcome to nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. And I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently Find Your Voice. Definitively grow your audience and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie, or an experienced professional, who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people and create even more impact than you're in the right place. Let's get started. 

  

Julia Campbell  1:33   

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to nonprofit nation with your host, Julia Campbell, just really excited to have you here with us today. And instead of writing my own intro, I used artificial intelligence to write the intro because that's the topic of today's conversation. So here is the hook that Jasper came up with. And I will put all the links in the show notes. AI is one of the most important technologies of our time, and it's something that every nonprofit should be aware of. In this podcast, I'm going to show you how AI can help your nonprofit organization become more efficient and effective. And that's actually what we're going to talk about. So that's not that's not too bad. So my guest today is Joshua Peskay. He is three CPO, and we'll talk about that at roundtable technology. Thank you to roundtable technology. They're the sponsor of this episode as well. Joshua has spent the better part of three decades helping nonprofit organizations make better use of technology in support of their missions. So in addition to leading roundtables security team and providing V virtual CIO services to numerous organizations. Joshua's is a national leader in helping improve cybersecurity in the nonprofit sector. So that is pretty incredible. He works regularly with address organizations to address digital security challenges, as well as presenting and teaching on topics such as nonprofit technology strategy, cybersecurity project and change management. And he also frequently collaborates with a potato, which I'm really want to discuss. Also, we will put Joshua's AI headshot from Lanza in the show notes because it is fantastic. And we were just saying beforehand, it's like Blue Steel, Blue Steel Joshua, which I love. So, welcome to the podcast. So happy to have you here. So great to be here. Julia, 

  

Joshua Peskay  3:46   

thank you so much for having me today. 

  

Julia Campbell  3:47   

Yay. And I keep saying I am the only person I've said on the podcast before that lens AI I just don't understand. They just don't get me. I've got to redo it. Because when I saw your selfie, it was really amazing. When I saw your headshot, I was like, Oh man, I want to look like that 

  

Joshua Peskay  4:03   

is a great fun and very silly thing. Yeah, but it likes so much depends on what selfies you pick from yourself. So, 

  

Julia Campbell  4:08   

so tell me about your role at RoundTable technology, three CPO and then also tell me about your collaboration with potato. 

  

Joshua Peskay  4:18   

So the three CPO title actually comes from my my now colleague shamak guard who recently joined us but a couple of years ago, we were kind of talking about our respective roles that are organizations and she mentioned that she actually wanted a title three CPO, and then I later asked her if I could actually steal it. It stands for that you're doing three different roles a virtual CIO, which you mentioned Chief Information Officer, Chief Information Security Officer often sometimes called the seaso and then a chief program officer meeting I'm doing a lot of the programming for roundtable like doing this podcast doing lots of webinars, you know, workshops and, and courses and things like that. So the three C suite roles is where The three si comes in. And then program officers Pio. So you get three CPOE. And my old title used to be like vcio slash cybersecurity, and no one really knew what that meant. And it required an explanation. So I ultimately decided if I'm gonna have a silly title that no one understands anyway, why not have it be also funny and have it be three CPOE so I I owe it to Shana who allowed me to steal that and she's found my colleague and co worker at roundtable and we're delighted to have her and as for the potato, so, dash Yes, my longtime colleague, Destiny Bowers, at the very beginning of the pandemic, when you know, we were all virtual, she discovered the snap cam, you know, filters that you could use and the wonderful animated potato and she showed up in one of our morning meetings as potato everybody was delighted by destiny the potato and basically said they only wanted to work going forward with destiny that potato she she somehow is able to embody the spirit of a potato in a way that that really can't be explained unless you've seen her. I don't know maybe a year later you know, Destiny now we're doing cybersecurity awareness training videos quite often. And we were doing the short recordings, but they were kind of your normal boring, like, you know, here's how to worry about MFA or things like this. And I thought, why don't we do a silly thing and I came up with this idea Tater and stash basically because it rhymes with Benny like basically my thought of the song Benny the jets and I was like to to tater in the stash. That's just funny to me. And I asked if we could do like a pilot the a few pilot episodes as tater in the stash. And here we are two years later still doing about an episode a month. 

  

Julia Campbell  6:40   

That is so amazing. No, I love what it says on the website. Cybersecurity can be really boring. Destiny and Joshua, aka tater, and stash have worked very hard over the years to make Cybersecurity Awareness accessible and fun. This is their latest effort. So I'll definitely post later, you can see from the pictures, but I'll post it in the show notes if people want to take a look. But that's creative. 

  

Joshua Peskay  7:05   

Yeah, for those of you don't know, Destiny, like she is not only one of the greatest people that I've ever worked with, but I mean, absolutely the greatest potato I've ever worked with. 

  

Julia Campbell  7:15   

And that's saying a lot. It really Yeah. So we're gonna discuss one of the biggest trends in the sector, if not the world, artificial intelligence. So what is this? What is this issue? And also, for those of you that are kind of skeptical that This even applies to nonprofits? Why is this an important issue for the sector? 

  

Joshua Peskay  7:35   

So I think to understand why AI is kind of such a big deal. Now, if you don't realize why it is I think it may seem like a tangent, but I want to go off on a little riddle. Ai Yeah, is on a very exponential growth path. And exponential growth as opposed to linear growth. Okay, linear growth is what we're all used to where it's a kind of steady line going up into the right, that kind of you could put a ruler to, okay, exponential growth is much more of a curved line, sometimes called a hockey stick, where it goes flat for a long time and then shoots very steeply upward. To understand this, let's think about this. Let's think of you and me and everybody that's listening to this podcast, we all live on a lake together. Okay, and it's May 31. And the lake is completely empty, clean, pristine, like, we all live in different houses around it. And on June 1, one lily pad is going to appear on the lake. And that lily pad is going to double every day for the month of June. So on June 2, you're gonna have two lily pads. On June 3, you're gonna have four lily pads. On June 4, you're gonna have eight lily pads. On June 5, you're gonna have 16 lily pads, and you can follow on from there. Now on the 30th day, okay, the entire lake is going to be filled with lily pads. This is an old math riddle that you would give to kids. Okay, around 20. I've heard this one. Yeah. And then exactly Penny the same one. And the question is, okay, if the 30th day is full, what day? Is it half full? Okay. And the answer to that is, of course, the 29th day, because if they're doubling every day, right on the 29th day, it's half full that doubles, and now the lake is completely full. So that one, while it catches a lot of people out, you know that it's half full the day before, it's completely full. If it's exponentially growing. That's how it must be that much harder question though. Okay, it's what's the first day that more than 1% of the lake is covered in lily pads. And if you kind of go with your intuition on that, you're probably going to land on something like the 10th or the 15th day, you know, maybe it'll be 1% covered, but actually, it's more than 1% of the lake isn't covered until all the way to the 24th day. At which point by the way. I think there's there's something on the order of 3 million lily pads. I forget the exact number but I mean, it's a huge number of lily pads. Actually. I think it's eight million by the end we get into half a billion lily pads on day 30. And so if you think about living on this lake, all these people, right, these lily pads have been doubling for 2324 days. And most of us living on this lake, you mean everybody's listening to this haven't even seen a single lily pad. But in five more days, the whole lakes going to be covered with them. So let's take this 30 days of June and apply it to 30 years. And let's take lily pads and replace it with AI. And what I'm going to suggest to you Julian to everybody listening to this as we're at like day, 24 day 25 Right now, and we're starting to notice AI affecting our lives, we're starting to make selfies using AI, we're starting to use tools to write the intros to our podcast episodes, we're starting to write blog posts using it, we're hearing about it in the news, we're seeing new applications and services and companies being built with AI. And all of a sudden, everybody's seeing these lily pads. And it's exponential growth. So what I'm suggesting is that this is going to explode from here forward. And if you're skeptical of that, that's okay. You know, we can absolutely disagree on that. But that's that's my take. 

  

Julia Campbell  11:19   

That's really a powerful way to think about it's kind of scary to think about it that way if we think of lily pads ticking over a lake, but I love that idea of how fast it's growing, and how fast it will continue to grow. So what are some of the benefits for nonprofits? Like why would we want to pay attention to this not just because it's something that's going to, that's something that is in our life, all of our lives, probably. But what are some of the ways we can use this. 

  

Joshua Peskay  11:46   

Where a lot of people's heads are at mine included is I think it's hard to talk about the benefits without feeling concern about the impact, and the things that might happen that we're not excited about happening. And so I'll talk about both throughout, and how people can try to think about it and how you can try to make sure as we're all in the nonprofit sector, that we're using AI in a way that is as responsible as we can, and trying to produce good and trying to avoid inadvertently producing bad, which, unfortunately, is extremely easy to do with AI systems and a whole variety of ways. So the simplest way to describe it as AI is a force multiplier, of the likes of which most human beings have never had in their lifetime. So as one example, okay, a year ago for a roundtable to write, you know, 1000 word article on some cybersecurity or technology topic. It went like this, our marketing person would say, Josh, I need an article for February, I'd ideally like it to be on one of these three topics, can you do that? I'd say sure, give me two weeks, I'll get to a draft, you can review it, I spent four hours one morning writing a draft like a half day back, and we'd crank out maybe an article a month, and it would take me four hours of my time a month, take our marketing person an hour of his time a month. So five hours of human labor, and four hours of my time, we got Jasprit I probably in March or April of 2022 and started using it. And our marketing person now and since can put out 812 articles a month that I would say are as good. You know, some of them are maybe a little less good, some of them arguably better than some of the stuff that I wrote. And the process is he generates titles that seem to match well with SEO, which the AI is helping him determine the AI creates titles that it thinks will do well on an SEO basis. And that are topics that are trending. He sends me a list of these topics as which ones do you like best I say I like these two, he comes back to me maybe a few hours later with like three articles that he's written using this AI tool that are each 1000 words, I take 15 minutes to review them make some edits, make sure there's nothing that's totally inaccurate or horrible. And say go ahead and those get published. And so if you do the math on that, right, like eight articles a month, in a couple of hours of time, and then 15 minutes of my time, right? I mean, we're operating at 10x 100x what we were before so it's it's a force multiplier in a massive way. And that's what we can get into it more but that's probably the number one way yeah, it can allow you to create content and produce output out of scale and pace and quality, quite frankly, that that I think was just took huge amounts of effort before. 

  

Julia Campbell  14:51   

So what are some of the pitfalls and the perils, if you will, that we want to avoid when using some of these technologies? Oh, actually, before I ask that question, I mean, we could all be wrapped into one. What are some other ways that people are using these technologies, because we've heard a lot about, you know, chat, GPT, and Jasper and things were copywriting. But what are some other ways maybe that, that we can use it? And then what are some of the pitfalls that we don't want to fall into. 

  

Joshua Peskay  15:21   

So let's talk about the kind of immediate things you could go and start doing today, the things you could do in a few weeks, or in a few months, if you started working on it. And the things that, you know, are probably, we have to see how it kind of pans out right, and when it will be accessible. So, the jasper.ai, and a lot of the image generation tools that you've seen, all right, are a class of AI tools referred to as generative AI, okay, and that they generate content from prompts given that given to them by humans. So what we have at a very high level of quality and maturity right now, are generative AI tools that can produce text and can produce images. So we've got chat GPT, which I think a lot of people have have played with and encountered that can generate really quite incredible quality text. It's a main ways that are frankly, you know, we there's been this argument like when will AI surpass human intelligence and things, and there's a very reasonable case to be made that the chat GPT is already significantly better than humans and a lot of things right, if I if, if we gave everybody in the audience 15 minutes to write 1000 word essay on 19th century agricultural trends in the style of the King James Bible and make it a musical and make it a musical? Sure, yeah. chatty, P. T, would would destroy all of us, right? It could do that 100 times in 15 minutes, none of us would even get through probably 100 words. Right? So uncertain things, it's already way better than us. The image generation tools such as mid journey lensa, which we talked about, Dolly, stable diffusion are kind of the big three are Dolly, mid journey, stable diffusion, but there's lots of other ones out there. They, again, if we asked everybody in the audience, you know, draw me photorealistic image of Darth Vader, you know, riding on a docks and through field of sunflowers with the faces of famous female world leaders, right? Where the flower would be, again, give everybody 15 minutes to do that. And you know, any one of these image generation tools are going to absolutely destroy us, they're going to give us beautiful, wonderful images. So in certain respects, just like AI is better at chess than any human being is better at go than any human being, you know, Ken Jennings, and all the Jeopardy champions, I think back in, that was quite a while ago, 2011 or so I forget how long ago that was the getting better at human beings in things that we consider more artistic and more human, like writing, being funny, even creating beautiful images. And we'll start to see, I think, quite soon based follows exponential growth that we talked about, right? Music videos, you know, scripts, I don't see any reason why the AI isn't going to get significantly better at all of us at doing all these things pretty quickly. So that that generative AI is one class of of AI tools. 

  

Julia Campbell  18:42   

Some scripts feel like they've been written by a robot. Well see. So then now I actually have a second question that I think leads into the pitfall question, Should we be worried about this as creative people? I mean, I'm a creative person. I write I blog, I podcast, I speak, I write books. What should the concern be? For people that do this, like even marketing professionals, fundraising copywriters? Should we be worried that we're all going to become obsolete? 

  

Joshua Peskay  19:17   

The short answer to that is probably yes. And the question, I guess, is does worrying about it help at all? You know, it's either gonna happen or it's not. I would say that that that people tend to fall into a couple of camps. I personally don't find any camp because I don't have any idea what's going to happen. And I'm quite candid about that. The end of human labor has been predicted countless times over the centuries of technological progress going back to steam engines or plows or the use of horses or you know, any other technological invention, and yet, labor persists. So we always seem to find something new to do that provides new value. There's a writer Are many of your audience may have heard Yuval Noah Harare wrote sapiens and Homo Deus. And he, I think coined the term like useless class, which he sees is coming like a large swathes of the population that really don't have anything of value to add to the economy, because there's nothing they can do better than robots or AI systems. And he sees that coming at some point. And people have been predicting that for some time, I certainly am not going to sit here and make a prediction about that. But I would say that the two camps are people who say, we keep people who said that forever, and we keep finding other things to do. So this idea that humans are going to become obsolete, has been proven false time and time again, we just don't know it will be you and I are both engaged in jobs that not only didn't exist when we were in, you know, primary school, but didn't exist, like 10 or 15 years ago. So what jobs someone will do in 10 years is impossible to predict, given the rate of change. So that's one camp, that will be fine. There'll always be things for humans to do. And the other camp, I think, is the Yuval Noah Harare camp, which is that there will be this useless class. And we have to and that's where you hear people talking about universal basic income, and the need to kind of create economic stability for huge swathes of the population. I honestly can't say, what I'm doing for myself is saying that in the meantime, and this is what I'd say to you, Julian, anyone listening, we are all in different degrees in collaboration and in competition with one another, right for resources for jobs, for donations, for attention of constituents. If you're using these tools, right now, you are just at a monstrous advantage, you're racing, someone and you're driving a Ferrari, and they're driving a go kart, if you're using these tools, and they're not, and flip it on its head, if you're not using these tools, and the people that you're in some competition with or collaborating with are using these tools, you're going to be falling behind very quickly, in my view. So I'm attempting to use them, and in as responsible ways as I can. 

  

Julia Campbell  22:10   

And I love the use of the word tools, because a lot of what I've been reading and listening to in the field of AI and especially in the creative fields, or you know, create or field is that it should be looked at as a tool, and how you wield it is incredibly important and who wields it and the purpose for which you willed it are all incredibly important. So it can't be looked at in a vacuum, as something that's going to take over the world. It needs to be looked at as how are we leveraging it? How are we learning about it? How are we using it to do our jobs better, until maybe like you said, our jobs evolve and change. 

  

Joshua Peskay  22:51   

I'm 50 years old, full disclosure, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I've thought for some time going back probably at least a decade or more, that artificial intelligence will be the single most important technological innovation in the history of the human species that has the potential to you know, completely abandoned, you know, life as we know it, and also has the probably will one way or another, but also has the potential to improve the world and our lives in ways that are not really imaginable to us right now. And I absolutely realized that may sound incredibly hyperbolic to a lot of people listening, but I do really believe that that's true, whether it's in five years, or 10 years, or, or whenever intelligence is the thing that differentiates us, you know, our intelligence, our ability to work together, our ability to, you know, collaborate and produce amazing things is the difference between the human species and every other species on the planet. And the ability to create something that is not just somewhat more intelligent than us, because, you know, it's not like the AI gets more intelligent and then stops, it just, again, follow the exponential growth, right, it passes us at some point and then quickly, is exponentially smarter than us and better than us as think, as described by the writing from chat GPT the examples I gave the image example. So imagine when that's just true of everything, like I want to put up a building and the AI can put up 20 buildings. And you know, it's hard for us to think to imagine right now the impact this could have. 

  

Julia Campbell  24:26   

So when I first discovered chat GPT so if you do not know what that is, Google it immediately start playing around with it, read news articles about it. My husband, of course, he's always more like he's always more technologically forward than me. So he started playing with it right the day that it was released to the public. And I thought oh, is this just it's sort of like how people thought about social media. I thought, oh, like, this is stupid. Like what can people use this for other than making up lyrics to songs about You know this and that, or it's sort of like how people thought Instagram was just going to be used to take pictures of your lunch. And now we know, you know, as being used for so much more. So I played around with it. And I actually use it to write fundraising appeals. So it can be used for that. But what I loved about it was that it provided a framework that I could then expand onto. So for me, I don't think I would ever use it to fully write a blog post. But I could certainly see it, helping me frame out the points, and pick out some of the most important things to maybe expound upon and then put my personality on it. Is that what you've been seeing? 

  

Joshua Peskay  25:41   

I think we see everything, but I think what their use you're describing, I think, is a phenomenal use of it. And something that I start doing right away, you know, we've been using Jasper, which has chat, GPT, like capabilities, you know, for almost a year now. And chat UBT is better at certain things, but what I find is, I would describe it as like, it removes a huge amount of cognitive load for me, because anytime I need to create some text, whether it's write an email, write a thank you note to somebody, write sympathy note to somebody, it's like, you know, whatever you think about me starting, you know, with, you know, a chatbot, or AI writer to do that, it just saves me the the terror of the blank page. And I can just give a prompt and say, write me a sympathy note for a dear friend who just lost a parent. And it produces an absolutely lovely thoughtful sentiment that and to your point, I can copy paste in personalized for myself, make sure everything in there is totally appropriate. And then sent and to your point, yeah, the the cutting into the irresponsible use of AI. And this is I think where we can segue to that is, if you don't read these things carefully and pay attention to it, the AI can be wrong, factually, you don't know how it got to its information, it will make up information that is false, with every bit of the same confidence as it provides information that is true, and we can't tell the difference unless you're an expert in whatever it is it's talking about. chatty btw, in fact, we'll get played in math problems wrong, which gets into the, how it works, that it's a language model, not a math model. So you might think, How can this thing be dumber than a calculator, but it is if you ask it like 99 times, you know, 17, I think often it will actually get that quite wrong. So you have to check these things. And you have to not just put it in a prompt, spit up 500 words, copy and paste it into a blog post, put it online, and never pay attention to it again. Because if that people read that and assume it's true, and assume it's what you Julia Campbell meant to say, that could get you in a lot of trouble that can produce effects that were not at all what you were trying to do. 

  

Julia Campbell  27:49   

How can we use these these tools on a shoestring budget, like you're maybe you're a department of one, you are an organization of one, and you're just looking to kind of dip your toe in, and then you can go into maybe some of your favorite tools that you use? 

  

Joshua Peskay  28:08   

Sure. I mean, this is the best news I could possibly have for your audience is that the vast majority of these tools are free, or incredibly inexpensive. So you know, chat GPT, for now is free. And you are absolutely encouraged to use it, Dolly, d a ll hyphen, e the image generator is free for up to a certain number of images per month. Stable diffusion, which is an image generator model that you actually run on your own computer is completely free and open source. Mid journey is free for up to a certain number of images a month. And then I think it's a walloping $10 a month if you you know, want to have unlimited ability to generate images. Jasper, what we pay for, I think, has a plan that's, you know, $19 $29 a month and they have free trials. Other tools, we might get into like chatbot tools where you can create custom chat bots for your organization's website, or as a whatsapp or as a text. You know, they're incredibly powerful chat bots that you can create to lead people towards certain conversions or interact or provide answers or provide support. And these tools are also you know, range from three to 10 to $20 a month, and the most expensive I've seen, you know, gets to like $100 a month for for extremely high level functionality. These tools are incredibly inexpensive right now, and I use all of these things, and I am not a coder. You know, I could not code my way out of a paper bag unless I was using tools to create that code, which I now good. And yet, yeah, and yeah, that I'm able to use all these tools incredibly effectively, you know, and certainly I'm tech savvy. I won't deny that but, you know, it's you do not need to be a coder to use these things at 

  

Julia Campbell  29:59   

all. And we were talking before about how I had heard that Microsoft is incorporating some of these tools into their suite. Can you talk more about that? I know a lot of nonprofits use Microsoft. 

  

Joshua Peskay  30:09   

Sure, yeah. And it's kind of interesting. Like, I don't wanna get too deep into this, but like Google's in a little bit of a conundrum at the moment, because it's a wonderful book, if you want to be called the innovators dilemma by a fellow named Christian, Clayton son, I'm sorry, Clayton Christensen, who passed away a while ago. But Google's kind of stuck in that right now and has to do with that, you know, certainly they've had these AIs are very powerful. They've been way ahead on the AI, in fact, in many respects, but so much of their revenue comes from AdWords, that it's not, you know, if you think about how chat GPT works, where's the AD AD to generate revenue there. So Google has this problem, they start releasing these tools, they're undercutting their own revenue. And this is the nature of the innovators dilemma that he talks about, which is you have companies that are in the lead, and are going to be disrupted unless they disrupt themselves. But it's very hard to disrupt your own revenue with some other innovation. So what happened is Microsoft in 2019, I invested a billion dollars in a company called Open AI, which at that time was a nonprofit organization, it's now gone private, open AI is the company that made that makes GPT, which I forget what it was for what it stands for, it's generative, something transformer anyway. But it's, it's it's a model. It's like a language, neural network that just consumes huge amounts of language. And then, and that's what's behind Chet GPT. That's what's behind Jasper Jasper is using what's called GPT. Three, which is open eyes tool that they release as a as an API for companies to use GPT. Four, by the way, which is going to be by most accounts, orders of magnitude better than GPT. Three, which is what created the title for the show today. And the introduction, is coming out sometime this year. And you know, going back to the lilypad thing, that's going to be another exponential leap, probably in the advancement of these things. So Microsoft invested a billion in opening, I started going off tangent there. And they just invested another 10 billion, but as part of that billion dollar investment, they have rights to some of the opening AI tools and have a partnership with open AI and they are integrating chat GPT into the Bing, yes, the Bing search engine, how many people have heard of thing lately? Well, being might be the new Google a year from now. And we might be bringing things instead of googling things are just talking idea to think about. 

  

Julia Campbell  32:45   

And we might have little things in our house instead of Google homes, which I have. 

  

Joshua Peskay  32:50   

Yeah, we might have like a being smart speaker, I might be like, hey, Bing, what's the weather today and it makes me 

  

Julia Campbell  32:55   

just think of friends. 

  

Joshua Peskay  32:59   

A big and Microsoft is also going to incorporate chat TPT into Microsoft Word into PowerPoint tools. And And again, there are already generative AI tools that will generate slide decks for you. There's there's at least five or six that I know right now. 

  

Julia Campbell  33:12   

Yes. I love the PowerPoint tool that judges your slides.  

  

Joshua Peskay  33:18   

Yeah. So imagine, you know, basically, you say I just want to 16 page slide deck on this topic with you know, this style. And like two seconds later, it's basically like 90% done, my life would be easier. Yes. Yeah. And so that's going to really give Microsoft a leg up. And Google I don't know, you know, there's this whole news article, I don't know how true it is, but that Google declared a quote, unquote, Code Red, which is really bad branding, given what I remember Code Red, as from a few good men, it's like not a term you want to be throwing around in your organization, but basically declared an emergency that that they view disruption on the horizon, and they've been really, you know, almost totally dominant in search for nearly 20 years now. And so that's, that's a huge disruption to the world. You know, the idea that Googling something would be an antiquated idea for, you know, a teenager five years from now. They'd be like, Google, what? Like, if that's possible, I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but it's, you know, this is in, I cannot overstate how disruptive a technology this is. 

  

Julia Campbell  34:21   

Well, I think of tick tock, you know, my daughter doesn't Google stuff. My teenage daughter, she goes on tick tock, that's her plot or YouTube. Those are her discovery platforms. 

  

Joshua Peskay  34:30   

And I owe this to a podcast called Hard fork. 

  

Julia Campbell  34:34   

I love that podcast. Yeah. 

  

Joshua Peskay  34:36   

Okay, so you may have heard this conversation so Casey Newton, I think and Kevin Roose, I hope I'm remembering their names right? Are two technology journalists to talk about it and one of them said this I'll paraphrase it but that you know, we think of you and I, I don't know You know, I assume you're younger than me but maybe remember like making a mixtape right, which is...  

  

Julia Campbell  34:58   

I remember mixtapes I wish I had my coffee mug that has mixtapes on there. Yeah. 

  

Joshua Peskay  35:02   

So a human curating human music, right for another human. Okay. And then now we have, you know, tick tock, which is an AI and algorithm, curating human generated content for humans. But what does an AI dynamically generating content for a human look like when Julia goes on to tick tock, and it's not presenting Giulia videos created by humans that it's curating for you based on what you seem to like, it's actually dynamically generating video content for you, and then continuing to iterate the kind of content it generates for you, based on what feedback you Giulia give it. So now, Julio, has a never ending mixtape of music that never existed before being generated for you endlessly. That's like that crazy science fiction gonna happen someday. That's like happening now. 

  

Julia Campbell  36:09   

if you think about Spotify, or even the YouTube algorithm, where you listen to music, and then it continually tries to show you more music that you might like, I enjoy that. I like discovering new things, but you're talking about it creating something completely new, just for you, as if we couldn't get more narcissistic and are 

  

Joshua Peskay  36:32   

Well, and also and then we get into the ethics of what does that look like when, right? Because we've seen what happens to the world when people get off into their own information bubbles, and their own confirmation biases and are able to simply perpetuate that right through algorithmic decisions. So when the content is actually created, is is algorithmically determined and giving you more and more of what you want and less and less of what you don't. We all have, in effect live in worlds of our own imagining, and how we relate to each other. And that's where you get into you know, the analogy I put up a post the other day on LinkedIn called the alignment problem and how I view that is kind of the most existential problem we have, which is, did you see Fantasia, the Disney movie Fantasia with the sorcerer's apprentice. So that's the easiest way to think of an alignment problem is, you know, Mickey Mouse, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, by the way, that story goes all the way back to like 1797 It was a Gert to poem, I think, the sorcerer's apprentice. So this idea of like alignment problems goes back, you know, to all the way that far but so you know, Mickey uses magic we can think of magic and AI is indistinguishable right? To the broomstick, the stark carrying water for him. And the brooms, then carries too much water. So he smashes it and won't stop. That's the alignment problem, right? You know, Mickey said, you know, your objective function is to carry water. And there were no parameters there was no anything else. So it didn't didn't say don't flood the entire castle. Don't stop when you get to this thing. It just objective function, which is a term within AI, right? And or machine learning. It's filled with thing. So even when he smashes up the broomstick, all that does is create this exponential problem, because now he's got 1000 That is a million broomstick. Yeah. And they're all carrying water. So that's an alignment problem, right? Where you, you create an objective function, like, give Julia all the content she wants all the time, and just keep giving her content based on the feedback she gives. And I don't give it any parameters like, you know, don't give Julia information that's false. Don't give Julie information that's hateful, don't give Julia information that will reinforce systemic biases, you know, against certain groups. Just give her what she wants over and over and over again, and keep giving her more of it. And going back to like, why nonprofits should care about this. Now, I would say that as a sector, right? We have a chance. And I think a responsibility, I would argue, to learn these things and to use these things, these tools that are the most powerful tools that humans will have ever encountered. And I'm including nuclear energy in that and really focus on how can we ensure that we're using them for good because I will tell you, as we've seen, the for profit companies, they're not necessarily trying to do bad, but they're not particularly concerned with the negative second and third order effects that their decisions have on society. We are and going back to you know, if we're riding go karts, and they're riding Ferraris, we're not going to compete very well in that race. But we're a huge sector, you know, we employ somewhere between 1/4 and 1/5 of all the people in the United States. That's a lot of people that can create a lot of impact. 

  

Julia Campbell  39:52   

Wow, I could talk about this for hours. I'll have to have you back on the podcast. I was just it's just my brain is spin Seeing with all the possibilities, a book for my listeners, I really recommend the smart nonprofits doing human centered in an automated world by Beth Kanter and Alison fine. I also had them on the podcast. 

  

Joshua Peskay  40:12   

And they're fantastic people. And yeah, we're way ahead of this, by the way. 

  

Julia Campbell  40:16   

Yeah, totally ahead of us. That book came out. I was just trying to find out when that book came out, but I had them on. They were my first guest on the podcast, 

  

Joshua Peskay  40:27   

bring it to them and great for you. That's, that's a perfect, I'm honored to to follow you. There's giants and all that, you know, I'm honored to follow behind them. Yeah. 2020 to march 2022. But that means they were probably writing it in 2019. 

  

Julia Campbell  40:43   

So where can people work with you work with roundtable technology and find out more about you, Joshua? 

  

Joshua Peskay  40:49   

Yeah, well, that's really easy, you know, roundtable technology.com, just like it sounds. And the big thing I want to mention is, I don't know if this will come out before January, it should come out the day before the web day before. Okay, so assuming this comes out on Wednesday, January 25, if you're listening to it, either that day or the next morning at 2pm. Eastern or 11am. Pacific, we have our best free one hour Cybersecurity Awareness Training ever, our seventh annual because every year it's better than the previous year. So it's still the best one ever. It's free, we actually give out a fair amount of money, there's hundreds of dollars in prizes that you can win, we try to make a lot of fun, there will almost certainly be a potato involved. And we'd love to see you there. To learn more about cybersecurity. 

  

Julia Campbell  41:32   

It's nonprofitIT.com, forward slash best dash ever. And I will be putting that link in the show notes. I'll be putting that link in the email. So I encourage all of you to sign up. It's free, win some prizes, see a potato, learn about cybersecurity, ask all of your burning questions, I think it's going to be a really good time. So this has been absolutely fascinating. This topic is just something that is just going to continue to grow and continue to build. So I would love to I'd love to have you back to see where we are even in like six months.  

  

Joshua Peskay  42:08   

Sure. I'd love to be back. This is absolutely fantastic. Julia, thank you so much for having me today. And thanks for the work you do. 

  

Julia Campbell  42:20   

Well, hey there, I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show, and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to. And then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode. But until then, you can find me on Instagram at Julia Campbell seven, seven. Keep changing the world you nonprofit unicorns.