Rootcause Summer School Roundup
Rootcause Summer School Roundup
This August and September we ran a series of webinars based around the question WTF are we going to do about AI? led by the Rootcause team of media, communications and technology professionals who work with AI for impact organisations every day. AI is quietly creeping into the way we work and whilst many of us may not want to fully embrace it, there’s a clear need to better understand both the technology and the possible implications for how we work.
From our side of the camera it was a lot of fun and we’re grateful to the almost 200 people who showed an interest in what we had to say. We’d love to hear from you if you attended or watched the recordings so we can continue providing the most relevant and helpful support.
If you need a reminder of what was discussed before giving us feedback, here’s some main takeaways from each session:
- Jonathan discussed the importance of understanding how LLMs play a filtering role at lots of stages of how we create and consume information and therefore why it’s so important to know what they are saying.
- Rasha spoke about the AI tools already available and in reach for impact organisations to gain insights, and encouraged everyone to experiment with publicly available information
- Nick reminded us how new AI still is for organisations, so teams need to be given the space and time to come to terms with AI.
- Ben pointed out that open source models are not that far behind frontier models like Claude and Chat GPT, and as they become more useful and accessible we’re all wondering what that means for the wider economics and politics of AI.
We had sign-ups from over 100 organisations including think tanks, NGOs, political parties and green energy. As we hoped, we also learnt some things from the audience! The specificity of the questions showed us how engaged everyone was, and the level of thought going into how best to use AI for a more just world.
We asked what challenges the sector is facing when working with AI, here’s what you told us:
In preparation for the first session we also ran 2500 questions through leading LLMs about organisations in attendance to come up with some general GEO tips for the sector. Watch out for our next blog post where we will be sharing these.