Consider THIS Your Prompt.
This article is part of Finding the Words, a newsletter that delivers practical insights on the day’s issues.
The latest research from Just Capital has dropped, and the headline is staggering: the Americans who use AI most—the people opening and engaging with the tools every day—are also the ones most in favor of slowing down the technology to address safety and governance concerns.
According to the new national poll, 78% of daily users support pausing or slowing AI development so that each new release can be evaluated more carefully. Among Americans overall, it's 72%. And when asked whether a slowdown would make them trust the tools more, nearly three-quarters of daily users said yes.
Are you catching what I’m catching?
The people who know the tools best, who reach for them every day, are the same ones asking tech companies to pump the brakes; to slow down and prove that the technology is safe and that careful measures are in place to ensure it does not get out of control.
That's a critically important observation, particularly when taken with Bill Gates' latest warning about AI, which he published last week in a 6,000-word essay on his personal website. In the essay, Gates warned that AI could either be the greatest equalizer or the worst source of injustice—and that right now no one is adequately preparing for what's coming: Entry and mid-level jobs eliminated faster than new ones can be learned, AI-enabled fraud at scale, cyberattacks on hospitals, banks, water systems and power grids made easy, and grave impacts on young people's development (more on that below).
His sharpest concerns weren't actually about the technology, though. They were about the people building it, who share concerns but are choosing not to disclose them.
I read Gates' article, and my mind went back to 2010, when Steve Jobs was asked in an interview how his kids liked the iPad. "They haven't used it", he said, because Jobs limited how much technology his kids used at home. The man who had put a screen in everyone's pocket was careful about the screens in his own house. Turns out he wasn’t alone in limiting his loved ones from tech—then or now. Last week, Fortune Magazine highlighted similar parenting rules of today's tech leaders. YouTube's CEO Neal Mohan limits his own kids' time on YouTube. Snap's CEO Evan Spiegal keeps phones out of his younger children's hands. Peter Thiel caps his kids' screen time at 90 minutes per week.
If we choose to look, the warning signs are all around us: in Bill Gates' letter, the Fortune article, the Just Capital research, and one more, right in front of me. My high schooler and middle schooler both came home from their first week of school with AI pledges: to not use the technology unethically or irresponsibly. Schools are requiring restraint of kids, while, back to that Just Capital research, nearly half of the 1,002 largest US-based companies (498 of them) disclose nothing about how they're handling AI safety governance or oversight, and only one company (Salesforce) discloses across all nine issues that Just Capital measured.
What does that juxtaposition signal about our relationship to technology in this country?
I think it says we've largely decided that restraint is a personal virtue and childhood lesson, rather than an institutional responsibility. We ask a middle schooler to put their values on paper, but we don't require the same of the enterprise leader worth billions. At least for now, it's easier to hold our kids accountable than the people with the most knowledge and power to act.
But, who says we have to wait for Washington to act before we start setting our own terms—even as we should push for the broad guardrails that Gates and others are demanding.
And this is exactly where I am choosing to find a glimmer of hope.
I wrote in this column not too long ago that just because we can use AI in every situation doesn't mean we should. The question hasn't been if or when we'd bring these tools into our work; it's on whose terms.
And that's an answer you get to decide.
Even Gates agrees. It's good that some companies are proposing fixes for the problems their products have created, but the ultimate choice should belong to a public process that includes educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders.
That's us, if we choose to accept it.
At Mission Partners, we've spent the last two years building a framework for how we choose to use AI. We carefully examined what it means to use AI technology ethically and responsibly, and documented our findings in our Aligned for Good framework.
Ethical use asks a values question: is this the right thing to do, for what purpose, and whose benefit?
Responsible use asks as a practical question: Am I doing this carefully, protecting people's data, disclosing where AI played a role?
We built this framework because we couldn't find a relevant model that applied to us—and because we knew how big a gap there is in setting AI policy in mission-driven organizations.
According to our own Insights on Purpose research, which we released earlier this year in collaboration with The Chronicle of Philanthropy, just 15% of nonprofits and 17% of foundations have contemplated an AI policy, and even fewer have one in place. If the mission-driven sector is waiting for tech leaders to set the standard, we'll have missed this opportunity to do what we know is needed and what we know is best.
And, if a room of 12-year-olds can be asked to name what they will and will not do with the tool, then surely we can too, in our policies, disclosures, and the terms we set with our teams.
Bottom line: the people closest to AI technology are the most concerned about it. Our job as leaders is to do what we know is needed in this moment: to set the standards that the giants have yet to set for us, and to decide how we'll use AI and on whose terms.
This post is part of the Finding The Words column, a series published every Wednesday that delivers a dose of communication insights direct to your inbox. If you like what you read, we hope you’ll subscribe to ensure you receive this each week.
