112 | Do you need an AI policy?

0:00 Hi there! Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast I share tips, tidbits, and strategies, thoughts for other practitioners. Now, today I want to share with you something that I've been working on behind the scenes, which is a bloom-and-grow AI policy. You might have heard those last two words, the AI policy, and thought, oh my gosh, delete, skip, I can't even listen to another single word about AI, especially if you're somebody who doesn't choose to use AI yourself. It feels like you might just want to skip on through to the next one. I actually really encourage you to keep listening, though, because even if you personally are not working with AI right now, your clients are.

0:44 If you are teaching, your students are working with AI, and therefore, you probably want to have some sort of written policy about this. So I wanted to share with you what I came up with. I've mentioned this, I think, on a few previous episodes, that this has been on my mind. Somebody who's really helped me to think through some of these is Amelia Ruby's Off the Grid podcast. She's had some really amazing guests on there and lots of food for thought. And a lot of what I came up with is based on things that I learned about or heard about or the work that they're doing over there on that podcast. So I'll put the link in the show notes to Amelia's, to the Off the Grid podcast and specifically some of the episodes that have AI policy links.

1:25 What I've decided to do for right now is I've been working on a policy to put within the courses and programs that I'm teaching. And then I'm also working on my informed consent for clients that come to work with me one-on-one. I'm separately, and I'll do a different episode about this once it gets done, probably later in the year, in the fall or beyond. I'm separately working on a personal AI policy to publish, and I'll share with you a little bit the difference between those two things in a moment. But for right now, the policy that I've been thinking about is just how do I want to, how do I want to think about AI being used within the courses and programs that I'm running and with, let's just stop right there.

2:06 So I thought on this for a while and I thought, you know. I feel that some people I know in my community are working with AI quite a bit. Other people have chosen to absolutely not have anything to do with it. And I understand both of those perspectives. I think it's really interesting and exciting technology. I think there's a lot of ways that it can streamline what we do and make us better clinicians. And I also understand the interest in not using it at all from an environmental perspective, from a creative thought perspective, from a saying as human as we can perspective. I think there's strong reasons to be on either end of the spectrum or anywhere in between.

2:47 So what I really, really didn't want to do in my policy is make anyone feel judged for deciding what they've decided, or I didn't want to cut people off from feeling like they could change their minds later. Like, if you feel that you have to take a stand one way or the other, then it feels harder to change your mind as new information comes, as you try something out and it doesn't work, or as new tools and technologies become available, I think it makes sense to reevaluate. So anyway, I was thinking about all these things as I was coming up with my policy. I also was thinking, like, what do I value about the community that might be affected by AI tools? And how do I want to put some boundaries or make some requests around that?

3:29 So let me just read you what I've come up with. This is a work in progress. I can't tell you that this will be exactly like it is for all time. But for right now, this is the community policy that I came up with for people in my programs. So it says, at Bloom and Grow, we are agnostic about AI tools. Some members use them liberally. Others have chosen to abstain completely. Because we're a community where sensitive information is discussed, including client cases and private information about business practices, we've developed the following policies related to generative AI tool use. Member AI assistants and note takers are not permitted to join Monday Mentoring or any Bloom and Grow live classes or sessions.

4:09 We record all sessions via Zoom with closed captioning enabled. Recordings are available to all members within 24 hours. Okay, so let me pause right there and share a little bit about this piece of things. This is one of the places where it gets a little bit hazy for me because now there are note takers, there are AI note takers that do not notify you that they're joining. Back in the olden days, a year ago, two years ago, if an AI note-taker was joining the session, it would have to be admitted as a Zoom participant. You know, this is how Otter and some of these work, everybody's notified. You can see so-and-so's note-taking assistant is a member, you know, they're present in the call.

4:50 But now things have gotten more advanced and there's plenty of note these ai note takers that you can just turn on and nobody else knows they're going so that was part of the part of the puzzle here for me that i felt like we needed to explicitly say this the other place where i felt a little bit. Not awkward, but I felt like I wanted to think about this intentionally, is I said member assistants or note takers are not permitted to join because Zoom has an AI assistant. I'm not using that right now, but we do use AI closed captioning and transcripting in Bloom and Grow. So I wanted to just say, I want to be in control of this for right now so that I can ensure that the data is being treated in a way that is, you know, legally compliant in case any client information is shared and that is not available to other people.

5:43 So I think that's part of it for me is like, oh, if somebody's recording our calls without other people knowing and it's for their private use only, that really didn't feel right to me. I feel that when I am turning on AI transcripting or closed captioning, that that is available to everybody in the call. Specifically, it's helpful for folks who are, you know, for various reasons, people want and use those tools, but it's not just for one person, it's for everybody. And I'm using. Specific tools for specific reasons to do that. All right, so back into the policy. The next part of the policy says, generative or agentic AI tools may not be used to capture, scrape, or generate assets from any Monday Mentoring or Bloom and Grow content, including community discussion boards, slides and handouts, recordings, transcripts, and so forth.

6:31 Please do not add Monday Mentoring or Bloom and Grow materials to large language models such as Claude, ChatGPT, or similar, even if you have data training turned off in your settings. Uploading our materials without consent of everyone involved violates our community trust and intellectual property boundaries. So again, this one is challenging because there's no way for me to control this. I do not know if somebody takes my recording or my slides or my reference list or what have you and puts it into Claude or whatever else, there's truly no way that I can stop that. And same as, you know, if somebody wants to screen capture my entire lecture video and save it for themselves to use later and cancel my subscription or whatever. Fine.

7:11 That's something I don't have control over. But I did want to explicitly say that, hey, it's against my policy. Ethically, I don't think that's a reasonable thing to do, to take somebody else's work and upload it into one of these tools, because then it's out of our hands. Even if data training is turned off, they are still retaining that information. It's very hazy, the ethics of what's happening, the environmental impact, all of that. So this is what I decided. You may feel totally differently. And, you know, of course, any kind of notes people take on their own, they can do whatever they want with. But, For the things that I'm producing, I wanted to make it explicit that I do not consent to those things being added to large language models.

7:53 Now, an interesting note, which I didn't address here, is that there are increasingly very, I don't know if they call them small, small language models, but there's some of these AI tools that can be hosted on your own computer that are for your own use only, that are not going beyond, you know, your little ecosystem. And I felt differently, I feel differently about those, but I feel like they're not, I don't know enough about them and I don't think enough people are using them at this point to really, I don't know, I didn't, I didn't feel that I could add that to my policy just yet, but I think for the large language models, this kind of covers it. Then the last piece of the policy says, disclose AI use within Monday Mentoring. If you use AI to help you draft a case study or generate protocol that you bring for feedback, please disclose that when you share it.

8:40 There's no judgment and it is still helpful for us to know. Additionally, please keep community forum and chat interactions human. Do not use AI to generate replies or posts for the forum or in live chat during sessions. So I felt that was a pretty reasonable request. The reason that my programs, I think, are one of the things I really love about the programs is that we're together in real time and we're talking to each other. So I wanted to just make sure that we're keeping that present as much as we can. Okay, so there you go. This is what I've been working on behind the scenes for my courses and programs. Like I said, I'm doing a separate policy for how I use AI personally that I'm going to write up and put on my website. I am right now I'm experimenting with some tools and I may or may not decide to keep them in various ways.

9:29 But I want to make that clear. I don't want to be using these tools without people understanding where and how and so forth. So I feel that in the interest of transparency, I'm going to create that, put it on my website. And I have just to give you a sneak peek one of the things that I've been experimenting with is doing writing up client notes not their protocols I do that myself still entirely and plan to do that forever but just taking a summary of the transcript of our call and putting it into a you know loose soap note format which is basically a data entry I've been experimenting with that But mainly from a time perspective where, you know, I don't feel like I'm adding any, it's not adding any new information to the call, but it is saving me probably 15 to 30 minutes of doing that myself.

10:16 So I'm using a HIPAA compliant tool where that information is not being used to train any models and so forth. So I'm trying it out just to see how it works. I've added it to my informed consent disclosure for clients. They have the option to opt out of it if they want to. But that's one example of how I am trying some of these tools and so forth. So anyway, there you go. That's where I am right now. I've got this policy. I'm putting it up in various courses, trying to let people know that it's there. And then I am working on creating a more personal policy to put up on my website and experimenting with some things moving forward. All right. I hope that's helpful. I just I wanted to bring this to your attention because, again, if you are sharing educational materials, if you have courses that you teach, if you are sharing materials with your clients, you may want to make this clear for your own clients.

11:06 Even if your whole thing is like, I don't use AI, I'm not interested in the AI, it's not part of it. But if you don't want your clients uploading your materials into AI, I think it's important to say that. If you've decided not to use AI, I think it's important to say that. Let people know. Some people, that might be a big selling point for why they want to work with you. Other people might be like, I want to work with somebody else. That's great. That's fine. It helps you bring the people, the right people into you. But I guess I'm just putting in a little plug for making your thoughts and your approach visible, and especially for... Letting clients know how you want them to, or students, what have you, what kind of permissions you're giving for your materials and what's possible to do with them.

11:52 All right, I hope that was helpful. We'll talk about this more later. I'm sorry for adding to the AI discourse. I know there's just like a lot out there right now, and it can be kind of overwhelming. And a lot of us are like, I just want to be with the plants and in the kitchen. I don't want to be thinking about this or talking about it. But I think, you know, we have to think about it. We have to talk about it even if we choose not to use these tools ourselves. So there you go. I hope that's helpful. I'll link to some of my other episodes that have to do with AI in the chat as well as that in the off-the-grid podcast recommendation so that you can dive into that as well. All right, thank you so much for listening. I hope you have an amazing day. If you would like to stay in touch and you are not already signed up for my practitioner notes email newsletter, you can go to intheclinic.com or camillefreeman.com or the show notes to sign up to get that.

12:41 It's always written by me, Never Any AI, homegrown newsletter for practitioners. It comes out every Thursday, and I would love to send it to you the next time it goes out. All right, I'll talk to you soon. Bye.