My guest today is Thomas Manandhar-Richardson, also known as Richie, from Vegan Hacktivists, an organisation providing free technology, design and data support to animal advocacy groups. Before joining Vegan Hacktivists, Richie was Research Director at Bryant Research, and he now also helps run Amplify, a programme teaching animal advocates how to make better use of AI.
There’s no shortage of somewhat vague discussion about how AI might transform our work, so we wanted to make this conversation as practical as possible. We talk about where AI can already save advocates significant amounts of time, how to give these tools enough context to produce genuinely useful work and some concrete ways they can support research, strategy and everyday organisational tasks.
We also discuss where advocates shouldn’t rely on AI, why humans still need to make the final decisions and what the animal movement could look like if these tools continue improving at their current pace.
Whether you’re already using AI every day or you’ve tried ChatGPT once and wondered what all the fuss was about, I think you’ll find this pretty useful. Enjoy the conversation!
Chapters:
(00:00:00) - Introduction
(00:10:14) - How Greener by Default uses AI
(00:16:38) - How most animal orgs use AI today
(00:22:12) - Context Is King
(00:36:25)- Do you need to know how to code?
(00:40:58) - AI for information gathering
(00:44:19) - Essential AI tools today
(00:49:28) - Ignore some shiny things
(00:54:04) - Possible risks
(00:59:18) - Quickfire use cases
Resources:
With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!
Note: My (James') views here are my personal opinions and don't represent those of Coefficient Giving.
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