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Is anyone using AI for good?

In a world where AI is replacing human workers, using up energy and water, and deepening disconnect, is AI for humanitarian good even possible? The answer is yes. In the first part of this two-part series, we're taking a look at just a few AI do-gooders and what they're doing to fight climate change, make healthcare more accessible, and help their communities.

February 11, 2026

Is anyone using AI for good?

When the first wave of modern-day AI hype started, a lot of people I knew were worried. Much of that worry has, so far and unfortunately, been well-founded. AI has done a lot of what people were afraid it would do. It’s pushed people out of jobs, consumed massive amounts of water and energy, and warped our ideas of reality, friendship, and community. Bad look, all around.

I can’t remember when I personally became aware of AI’s rapid spread—probably 2023, like most nontechnical people. What I do remember are the key moments since then when AI seemed to have an outsized impact on my life: getting laid off; being subsequently told by my mentor I should consider career paths outside of writing; struggling to find work when, as my mentor predicted, much of the job market for creatives was rocked by the generative AI boom; late-night despair-ridden, anxiety-laden, Wing Stop-fueled conversations with friends about our futures, society’s future, and the earth’s future; and now, when much of my writing for Stack Overflow has—unsurprisingly—been about AI.

A few years ago, I learned about a woman who was developing an AI tool to help people appeal insurance claims, borne from her own experience of being denied for small, sometimes incomprehensible reasons. Her theory was that an AI tool—trained on data about successful appeals—could help the everyday consumer take on the mentally taxing and tedious task of appealing insurance denials.

This project—ultimately a labor of love for creator Holden Karau and her business partner Melanie Warrick—is now the completely free tool Fight Health Insurance. To this day, it’s helping people appeal bogus insurance denials.

It was the first time I saw someone using AI just to help people. Not to make a quick buck, or increase productivity, or start a viral sensation—just to help people. As the meme goes, “Great use of free will.” In a time when the only thing my friends and I seemed to talk about was how bad AI would become if someone didn’t stop it (and how powerless we were to stop it, just a bunch of 20-somethings barely scraping by), here was a person who could adapt, take what was being offered by the world, and turn it around to do something actually good, just because they could.

From that point on, I would use Fight Health Insurance as a rebuttal to the doom-and-gloom approach to AI my friends would take. I’m a pretty clear-cut optimist, which can sometimes get on my loved ones’ nerves. FHI was a strong weapon in my favor—it’s hard to counter the argument that it’s helping people, at scale, in a way that wouldn’t be possible without AI. My friends’ rebuttals would usually be along the lines of, “Well one good thing doesn’t negate all these other bad things that AI is causing.” Which is true.

But what about a bunch of good things? What if we all did enough good things to make a dent in the bad?

The good news: Holden’s good work with AI is not the only example out there, and I’m here to tell you about a few of them happening, here and now. Not all the organizations I’ll be featuring have the same highly personal and selfless backstory as Fight Health Insurance, but they all share one thing in common: they’re taking our modern technological revolution in stride and using it for the good of humanity.

What does it mean to do good?

…And what exactly does it mean for AI to do good?

Ah, such small and uncomplicated questions I write about. For me, in order to be considered for the “AI for good” category, an organization must deeply embed AI technology into their work, either as a major function or as a way to scale. Do-goodery is a bit harder to define, but I’m calling it work whose mission is solely focused on solving humanitarian issues, preserving the environment/fighting climate change, or helping the everyman. These things can range from detecting earthquakes for better disaster response to reducing textile waste with AI inspection to assisting everyday people with insurance claim appeals. Ultimately, the work needs to positively impact people, the earth, or our society to be considered as “doing good.”

Even with that fairly specific scope of “doing good,” the possibilities that AI affords do-gooders is limited only by their imaginations. As Ryan Panchadsaram, Technical Adviser at Kleiner Perkins, succinctly told me, “My perspective on AI is that it is an incredible technology that can unlock so many areas of good for society.”

To illustrate this, let me tell you about Canary Speech. While AI-augmented healthcare is nothing new—and clearly on its way to becoming an integral part of our medical system, if OpenAI’s newest product is to be believed—what Canary Speech does is different. Canary Speech was founded ten years ago, when former NIH researchers Jeff Adams and Henry O'Connell—who would both go on to have illustrious commercial careers doing things like working on Siri, leading HP, and inventing Alexa after leaving the NIH—decided to do just one more thing with their expertise of voice: use it to diagnosis disease. Today, their AI tech is able to identify vocal biomarkers in patients to help clinicians detect and diagnose disorders and diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, depression, and anxiety.

This kind of work isn’t just supported by AI—it only exists because of AI. From far before the current AI boom, Adams and O’Connell were using neural network machine learning to research and identify these vocal biomarkers. They’ve now identified over 2,500 of these speech features. And if you’re wondering just how much of this is real, you can ask their recently published peer-reviewed study with the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School on the effectiveness of AI voice-screening for Parkinson’s detection.

What’s most meaningful to me is the human experiences that the team at Canary Speech shared. During a routine postpartum check-up, a new mother told her clinician that she “felt fine,” but her Canary Speech score came back with high levels of depression and anxiety. Based on her score, the clinician took the time to discuss her wellbeing with her on a deeper level, and this conversation allowed the new mother to open up and share that she had been struggling, quite a lot, since the birth. She was able to get care for her postpartum depression, something that might not have happened without Canary Speech’s AI.

Here is the good that is possible when we give AI tools to human experts, who wield them for the benefit of others. Canary Speech is, under FDA guidelines, a clinical decision support tool. It gives medical professionals a new way to identify patient needs that are sitting under the surface. In the case of the new mother, Canary Speech’s AI prompted the human clinician to have a human conversation with the patient, ultimately leading to medical care. As the saying goes: a canary in the coal mine. An early warning system, only possible because Canary Speech put powerful AI in the right hands.

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