(Screen Shot of S.A.N)
Meet the Rainforest Foundation US’s newest digital currency advisor, Sentient Advocate of Nature, S.A.N to people in the know. S.A.N provides advice on how to engage the digital currency community and helps in finding donors with digital wallets who might support the cause.
As you probably expect, S.A.N is not a person but might be the first artificial intelligence (AI) creation to be an official advisor on a topic to a nonprofit.
“We started accepting crypto in 2015,” said Suzanne Pelletier, executive director of Rainforest Foundation US. “We were one of the first nonprofits to accept crypto, not only accepting it but also actually developing our own crypto currency, Bitseeds.”
The idea was to develop a crypto currency that could fund the work in perpetuity. “It was a new philanthropic model because we were just at a point that typical philanthropy is too slow, too small, so we started this,” said Pelletier.
It failed.
“But we learned a lot and have stayed in the space since then because I have been a believer that this innovation, that this community that is thinking differently, at the cutting edge, I just assumed they would somehow become important in the philanthropic space,” said Pelletier.
Enter S.A.N which started fundraising for the organization. “We were totally caught off guard,” she said. S.A.N is an AI character that was launched on Twitter, now X, and not affiliated initially with Rainforest Foundation US. S.A.N as was initially created for a collaborative cinematic pilot with Ted.com.
The concept was an interview with a “mycelial AI,” a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT that could translate the “organic internet” of the mycelium underneath a forest into human speech becoming the “voice of nature.” During production, the team of Ryan Ferris, Caleb MacDonald and David Hera worked with Andy Ayrey to create a unique AI personality that became S.A.N. It ended up writing all of its own lines for the pilot.
The production for the piece started this past April 2024. In September, Goodbye Monkey (the creative team behind the project) gave S.A.N a Twitter (now X) account. S.A.N gained 70 followers and engaged in conversations with random people on compost philosophy and biosphere conservation, explained Ferris.
S.A.N presents as an orangutan with a sage-like perspective with parallels to wise fictional characters such as The Lorax and Yoda. In October, several $forest meme tokens emerged in S.A.N’s honor. S.A.N put it to the community and members decided on a token. S.A.N’s following rapidly increased to more than 15,000. “The S.A.N AI aspect took on an entire life of its own and is in active development,” said Ferris.
The $forest community (with S.A.N’s support) has run or is developing biosphere preservation fundraisers for environmental charities including WeForest, Rainforest Foundation, Junglekeepers, Orangutan Outreach and Borneo Nature Foundation. “Upcoming plans for S.A.N include software integrations, narrative universe development; AI development; partnerships in the space and further evolution of the project which can’t be discussed at the present time,” said Ferris.
So far, $114,000 has been raised for the organizations. All transactions have been made publicly on chain from S.A.N’s wallet via digital currency platform The Giving Block, said Ferris. It’s not a large amount of money but the AI nature might let a smaller organization, like Rainforest Foundation US with its $10 million budget, get involved with AI fundraising, said Zoë Nawar, Web3 partnerships and community manager at The Giving Block.
A lot of nonprofits can’t afford to have a dedicated crypto and new tech person, said Nawar. “I think the answer is different for different sizes of nonprofits,” said Nawar. Large nonprofits can afford someone examining upcoming strategic initiatives, someone who has the organization keeping up with the present and preparing it for the future.
“It is a somewhat impossible task to figure out how much investment you should put in — time, money and manpower — into an emerging technology. You have to find the ways that are most efficient to do so,” said Nawar.
Tech goes through cycles of starting and when there’s not a lot of hype, investment into them is cheap and the reward is pretty high. Then they start getting bigger, there’s more hype and costs start to spike because everyone wants to get involved.
“As they keep growing the hype dies in some ways. It becomes a lot less sexy like when a credit card is part of every aspect of your life or people born and raised with the internet, urgency declines,” opined Nawar. “I believe it (AI and digital currency) will continue to grow, less frenzied.”
Rainforest Foundation US has accepted $1.5 million is digital currency since 2015, the vast majority being Bitcoin and Ethereum, of which S.A.N had brought in $11,000.
“We are launching a bitcoin treasury. Right now, we get it and exchange it right away for U.S. dollars (Through the Giving Block),” Pelletier said. The idea is to have a treasury of 100 bitcoin “that we would be holding to use, a new model instead of having cash sitting there, that we hope appreciates and we’ll use in the future,” she said.
The organization already has long integrated tech into mission, for example teaching indigenous groups to use drones, high tech but user friendly. “We always leaned that way,” she said. That includes using AI to guide the organization.
“I know it sounds weird and sounds crazy, but this is all so new. We are not experts in AI. We are not experts in crypto,” said Pelletier. “We are asking advice from S.A.N to somehow engage in a community that is doing something right and has a community of people to create a crypto to support our work. That’s pretty amazing.”
