Between Us and the Machine | Episode 5: We Deserve the Butterflies

AI companion apps are scaling into the communities you already serve: LGBTQ youth, refugees, people with disabilities, migrants, and young people navigating identity in contexts of stigma, exclusion, and sometimes violence. The organizations best positioned to shape how this technology evolves are the ones serving these communities and who have earned their trust.

What Your Organization Already Brings

Humanitarian and development organizations have spent decades building exactly what responsible AI governance requires. Community trust. Trauma-informed practice. Iterative feedback from the people being served. Accountability frameworks built from the ground up.

These competencies are precisely what the AI governance conversation is looking for. Bringing them into technology policy discussions, funding conversations, and product accountability debates is a natural extension of work you are already doing.

The Questions Worth Bringing Into the Room

Your teams are already equipped to ask what matters most. Have affected communities had any role in shaping how these products are governed? Has impact been assessed before deployment at scale? Is there an accountability mechanism when something goes wrong?

Bringing those questions into the rooms where technology decisions get made is how the standard rises.

A Framework Worth Carrying

A pro-social AI framework offers practical language for this work. Pro-social means the technology can be profitable, and must also be pro-people, pro-potential, and pro-planet. The individual centered as a citizen, not a consumer or a product.

It is a simple test. And one your organization is well placed to apply and to champion.

Coming Up

In our next episode, we speak with Michael L. Buck, head of policy at AI Safety Asia and former Facebook public policy lead for Southeast Asia. His piece I Kissed a Boy and I Liked It is where this conversation starts.

Subscribe to Between Us and the Machine so you don't miss it when the episode drops.

Between Us and the Machine is hosted by Juliet (Mission AI) and Margot. We bring together policymakers, practitioners, and thinkers to have the conversations that matter about AI, power, and what it means to build technology that serves people.