Transparency · Our practice
Usage StatementSome of our thoughts and feelings about artificial intelligence, and about the choices we are making in relation to it.
Last updated: August 12, 2026
Where we stand
Dear friends of NVC Rising,
We would like to share some of our thoughts and feelings about artificial intelligence, and about the choices we are making in relation to it.
We notice that conversations about AI can quickly become divided. People may hold strong concerns about harm, loss, and power. Others may feel hope, curiosity, or relief at what these tools make possible. Sometimes, when we feel strongly, it can become harder to stay curious about experiences different from our own.
If you have found your way to this page, something here matters to you. A value of yours is involved. That is true for us too. So we would like to think alongside you, rather than at you: what might it look like when these tools are held by people who are not the picture you have in your head?
We want to contribute to a conversation in which more of us can be heard. We do not expect everyone to agree. We hope we can remain connected to the needs underneath our different responses.
We are not outside this question. We use AI in specific and limited ways, for example to help us communicate across languages and formats that we could not otherwise offer with our available resources.
We also want to say something about what these tools can and cannot do, at least as things stand today. AI does not produce meaningful content on its own. It has to be led. Left to itself, what comes back is plausible and empty, and anyone who has tried to use it that way will recognise this. Whatever warmth reaches you in our writing is there because a person on our team put it there, sentence by sentence, working with the tool. We could not hand this part over even if we wanted to.
We want to be transparent about this, and to remain open to learning about effects we may not yet see.
The growth of artificial intelligence is more than a technological change. It affects how people work, learn, communicate, make decisions, and relate to one another.
At NVC Rising, we are guided by the belief that human wellbeing rests first on the quality of our relationships: our relationship with ourselves, with one another, and with the systems in which we live. What technology allows us to do matters too, and it matters in relation to that.
As technology becomes more capable, we find ourselves asking: what human needs are we trying to meet? What choices help us care for dignity, connection, honesty, autonomy, creativity, and life?
These are the questions that matter most to us.
What we mean by nonviolence here
Since the word is in our name, we want to say what we mean by it, because it is easy to hear “nonviolence” as “staying out of things”.
For us, nonviolence is not passivity, and it is not purity. It is a commitment to act in ways that hold everyone’s needs as mattering, including the needs of people we disagree with, and including our own. It asks what we are trying to protect and whether our means are in tune with that.
That commitment has always had to meet a hard question: what do we do when forces that do not share it are already moving in a different direction? In NVC there is a distinction between the punitive use of force, which intends to make someone suffer, and the protective use of force, which intends only to prevent harm when dialogue is not available in the moment. The protective use of force is not something we celebrate. It is something we accept with sober regret, and we stay accountable for it.
We find ourselves near that question with these tools. If we step back from them entirely, they do not go unused. They continue to be used, at scale and with great skill, by people whose aims concern us, while voices working for connection, repair and dignity become harder to hear by comparison. Stepping back has consequences too, and we do not experience them as neutral.
We do not want to settle this too quickly in our own favour. It would be convenient for us to reach for “protective use of force” and stop thinking. The analogy is imperfect: protective force is meant to be immediate, brief, and followed by dialogue, and our use of these tools is none of those things. It is ongoing, it is comfortable, and it serves us. We hold the comparison as a question we keep returning to, not as a permission slip.
AI has many sides
We see that AI can be associated with real hope.
We also see reasons for concern.
We do not want to reduce this complexity to a story in which AI is either a solution or a threat. Both views may contain important information. Neither, on its own, gives us enough guidance.
When we look at the risks, we are not only looking at the technology itself. We are also looking at the conditions in which it is designed and used.
A tool built inside that world tends to arrive pointed in the same direction. It gets designed to win markets, to cut costs, to hold ground against rivals. Not because the people building it are careless, but because those are the conditions they are working under, and a tool answers the question it was made to answer.
The clearest example is what happened to our attention. Over the past two decades it stopped being ours and became something to be captured, measured and sold. Whole industries now run on how long a person can be held in front of a screen. The feeds most of us read every day are not built to inform us or connect us. They are built to keep us there, and they work by finding what agitates us, because agitation holds attention better than calm does.
None of that started with AI. The incentives were already in place, the business models were already built, the erosion was already happening. AI makes it faster.
For us, the question is not simply whether AI is good or bad. We want to ask what it is being used for, whose needs it serves, who participates in the decisions, and who carries the costs.
Where we are standing when we say this
We want to name our own position, because it affects what we notice and what we may miss.
In the places where we live and work, we have not yet experienced the local effects of data-centre expansion as directly as some communities elsewhere have. We are still learning about the environmental, economic, and social effects of the infrastructure that supports AI.
We know that distance from an impact does not mean the impact is small. It may mean that others are experiencing it before we do.
We want to practise humility here. We do not want to claim certainty where we do not have it. We want to listen to people who are directly affected, and to let what we learn influence our choices.
A time of disruption
We see AI changing who can access knowledge, tools, and the ability to turn an idea into something real.
For much of modern history, these opportunities were strongly shaped by where someone was born and by their access to money, education, networks, tools, and institutional support.
Today, some of those barriers are becoming lower. A person or group with limited resources may now be able to translate material, develop ideas, communicate across distance, or create useful resources in ways that were previously available mainly to well-funded organisations.
This access is not equal. Many inequalities remain, and new ones may be created. Still, we see meaningful possibilities for grassroots groups, small organisations, and people who have often been excluded from resources and influence.
For NVC Rising, this is not an abstract point. It is the difference between what we can offer and what we cannot.
We are a handful of people. There is no marketing department here, no communications team, no budget line for translation or design. For most of our history, the limit on what reached you was never how much we had to give. It was how many hours were left in a week after the actual work of teaching and holding groups was done. Materials stayed in one language because no one had time to translate them. Ideas that could have served people stayed in a folder.
That is the gap these tools narrow for us. Not ambition, not scale for its own sake. The plain ability of a very small group to reach the people looking for this work.
At the same time, we recognise that the same tools can be used by powerful institutions to influence people at greater scale and lower cost.
This brings us back to a question we want to keep asking: who are we working for?
We want to consider not only what a tool can do, but also whose needs it serves, who has a voice in how it is used, and whether its use supports choice, understanding, and connection.
We do not assume that our answers will remain complete. We want to keep listening and revising our practice.
What AI makes possible for a small initiative
The clearest example for us is language. Much of this field, and much of the internet it lives on, still runs mostly in English, and that quietly shapes who gets to take part. It is changing, slowly, and not yet fully. We would like an invitation to a course to reach someone who does not read English, in the language they actually think in, and until recently that was simply beyond what we could do.
Other things are smaller and just as ordinary: a recording of a session turned into a transcript, so that someone who missed it can read what was said. A post edited until it is clear rather than published half-finished. Each of these was, until recently, either a paid service or an unpaid weekend, and often it was simply nothing at all, because there was no one to do it.
AI narrows that gap. It lets a small team do work that previously required more time, staff, or funding.
We experience this as potentially supportive of fairness and participation. It can give under-resourced, values-driven groups more ability to communicate and contribute.
We do not say this to minimise possible harms. We say it because we want to be honest about the needs these tools meet for us: reach, accessibility, effectiveness, and the ability to share our work with more people.
Our AI usage policy
They are working commitments, and we expect them to change as we learn more.
Every piece of writing that carries our name is written, selected, or approved by a human being on our team.
AI may help us clarify, translate, shorten, or adapt language. It does not decide what we believe, what we mean, or what we communicate.
We do not publish content that no one on our team has read and is willing to stand behind.
Stories from our community, participant reflections, and accounts of what happened in a dialogue circle are real, or they are not published.
We do not present AI-generated stories, testimonials, voices, images of identifiable people, or composite experiences as though they were real accounts from our community.
When a task can be done well with a model running on our own machines, we choose that option rather than sending the work to a remote model.
Several parts of our work already run this way, with nothing leaving our own computers: our ‘simple’ videos and animations, voiceovers, transcriptions of recordings, and basic editing and grammar corrections.
This reduces our reliance on data-centre infrastructure and its environmental costs. We use hosted models only where a local option cannot reasonably meet the need.
We use AI to polish writing, translate it, and adapt posts to different platform formats. Social-media ranking systems influence which posts people see. As a small initiative without an advertising budget, we want to understand these systems well enough to remain visible.
The distinction we make is between form and substance.
AI may help with form: clarity, rhythm, length, language, and format. It does not determine the substance of what we communicate.
We do not use AI to create false urgency, intensify outrage, exploit people’s pain for attention, target people because they may be vulnerable, or communicate things we do not mean because they may perform well.
We want our communication to support informed choice and genuine connection. If a technique would increase attention by contributing to fear, shame, or disconnection, we do not want to use it.
We do not put personal data from participants, registration forms, or private conversations into hosted AI tools, not for summarising, drafting, or convenience.
Privacy, trust, and choice matter to us. If this practice changes, we will say so plainly.
We are willing to answer questions about which tools we use and what we use them for. This page is part of that commitment.
If you ask us a direct question about our AI use, we will offer a direct answer.
What we bring to this
For years, we have gathered knowledge not about artificial intelligence, but about another kind of intelligence: the intelligence that can emerge when people build trust, listen to their bodies, stay present through conflict, and remain in relationship across real differences.
We have been learning what helps people hear one another when needs, strategies, and perspectives differ. We have practised what it can take to remain connected when it is difficult.
We believe this learning matters in the present moment.
An open question, honestly held
We experience a real tension. We use tools created by companies whose values may differ from ours. These tools depend on infrastructure with ecological and social costs. They have been trained on work whose creators may not have been asked or compensated fairly.
We also use them because they help a small group of people do work that we believe serves connection, learning, and social change.
We do not want to pretend this tension is absent. We want to name it, stay present with it, and let what we learn affect our choices.
Some of the questions we sit with
These are not questions we have settled. We put them here as they actually come up between us. Even though we work as a team, our personal views differ.
We would genuinely like to hear from you.
Where do you think we could set clearer boundaries? What might we not be seeing? What would help you understand how a group like ours uses these tools?
How is this landing with you?
Choose anything that feels true for you. One click is enough to tell us something.
Thank you. Received, and it lands with people, not a dashboard.
You may choose more than one option. We do not ask for an email address, and responses are collected without identifying information.
If you would like to say more, our door is open. You can reach us through our contact page.
This page will change. Your response is part of how.
In connection, The NVC Rising team
About this text: it was written by us. The thinking, the positions, and the wording are ours, and every line has been read and stood behind by a person on our team. A local AI model, running on our own machines with nothing sent anywhere, helped with corrections, formatting, and layout. It seemed right to say that on a page about this subject.