The National Lottery Community Fund has launched a £3m funding programme aimed at helping charities develop their own artificial intelligence (AI) tools to better protect communities from the adverse impact of the technology.

It said the fund has launched in response to “concerns about the emerging impacts of the use of AI on communities” in areas including workplace monitoring, screening algorithms and diagnostic tools in areas including healthcare and education.

The programme is being launched in partnership with UK Community Foundations and CAST (Centre for the Acceleration of Social Technology) with the first grants set to be awarded this Autumn.

The funding aims to support 50 charities and community organisations to pilot approaches to supporting communities amid the growth of AI in their lives and to develop “alternative AI tools and models rooted in local needs and lived experience.”

The NLCF explains that “projects under the pilot could include, for example, a local charity that supports people with benefit claims, funded to spot when decisions made by an algorithm are going wrong, and to share those warning signs with the wider network of 50 community organisations so that early action can be taken”.

Application details, including around deadlines, will be made available via the UK Community Foundations’ website.

“AI is advancing at extraordinary speed, but society’s ability to understand, interpret and shape that change is not keeping pace,” said NLC chief executive David Knott.

He added that the funding to be available aims to help “communities see change earlier, make sense of it together, and shape a parallel path in which AI is guided not only by technical possibility, but by social wisdom”.

“If communities are to help society learn and adapt in this moment, they cannot sit at the edge of these systems - they have to help shape them,” he said.

Zoe Amar, who is co-chair of the Charity AI Task Force, urged “more funders across the sector” to follow NLCF’s lead in helping charities bolster their use of AI to support communities.

The funding has been announced at this week’s AI for funders conference in London, which featured speakers including Rachel Coldicutt, the founder of Careful Industries, which is carrying out a global review into AI safety.

"Industry headlines focus on hype and short-term return, but the impacts of AI on communities tend to surface over time and often impact marginalised communities first —  data centre disruption, deepening digital exclusion as services shift to digital by default, and emerging harms such as vulnerable users turning to chatbots in place of qualified mental health support are all playing out in real time," she said.

AI use among charities is already widespread, according to early findings from this year’s Charity Digital Skills Report, which has been compiled by Amar’s consultancy Zoe Amar Digital.

Across all charities almost nine in ten are using AI tools as “part of everyday work” compared to just over three in four last year, the report found.

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