Podcast – Ethical Ways to Use AI

Amanda and I have known each other for YEARS and started podcasting together in 2018.  Back then, “should I let a robot write my grant?” wasn’t a question anyone was asking. Now it comes up in nearly every training we lead, from brand-new grant writers who assume AI can just do the whole job to seasoned folks who won’t touch it on principle. So, in our latest episode, we talked through our opinions and uses of AI. Spoiler alert, the two of us don’t fully agree, which is exactly why it’s worth a listen.

Come for the respectful disagreement; stay to find out who thinks that AI is like fire or wine.

Here’s what we do agree on: AI is a tool, full stop. One of us uses it for wrangling stubborn tables, formatting citations, and cross walking a draft against a NOFO to catch any gaps in information. The other barely touches it, mostly for idea generation when a blog post needs a nudge and still ends up rewriting most of it to sound human. Both approaches are fine. This is a judgment-free zone of a conversation, but we will judge you if you’re refusing to think about it at all.

What we won’t do is hand AI an RFP and let it write the whole thing. It’s the old database argument with a twist…garbage in, garbage out. If you feed the AI maw with nothing solid, you get generic mush back, and it will happily hallucinate data that doesn’t exist anywhere. And if you’ve never written an objective yourself, how would you even know whether what it hands you is any good? Learn the craft first, then let the tool speed up the busy work. Either way, read and verify every single word.

We also got into the messier stuff: funders now asking you to “certify” whether you used AI, with, well, AI detection tools so shaky they flag decade-old grants written long before any of this existed, and the very real environmental cost of the data centers powering it all. We’re not convinced “it’s inevitable” is a good enough reason to stop asking hard questions.

Give it a listen — then ask yourself a few questions:

• Do I understand this task well enough to know if the AI’s output is any good?
• Am I using AI to think, or to avoid thinking?
• Have I read every word for accuracy, invented data, and wrong-state statistics?
• Does this funder’s NOFO say anything about AI use — and am I honoring it?
• Whose water, land, and neighborhoods are powering the tools I rely on?
• Am I building my own skills, or quietly eroding them?

How do you use AI in your work, or do you use it at all? Drop us a line at hello@haydayservices.com, and let’s continue the conversation.