Strong communities are built on shared goals and trust.
Case Study Can AI help forums get real members?
- Thread starter Bawse
- Start date
For real-world examples and success stories.
The question isn’t whether it’ll help gain members. It’s whether it will bring valid to the members you have.
There are plenty of tasks that AI can assist with, meaningfully - categorising if an image might be NSFW, assessing posts that might fall foul of obscenities, toxicity, racism etc rules you have. All that stuff is helpful to moderators by doing a first pass so they don’t have to.
Where the problem lies, though, is in the generative stuff. It cannot be trusted to return facts, it cannot be trusted to return or retain information, it does not learn things beyond what its owners teach it. And frankly I think there are few uses of generative AI that are useful for forums - the heart of forums is people talking to each other, and generative AI doesn’t help with that.
What value can you bring, in most cases, where you’re producing content that isn’t made by humans for humans? There are some specific edge cases - support forums where you can trust it has been fed things that are useful to you and where it can have a go at a first attempt at helping. I have seen it used for sparring in collaborative storytelling - where you want to write with someone but noone’s around, so you write back and forth with generative AI (though I’d submit this is not only a niche use but the majority of such communities that practice collaborative storytelling actively do not want this)
But generative AI has few real uses for a forum. Categorical ones have more uses.
There are plenty of tasks that AI can assist with, meaningfully - categorising if an image might be NSFW, assessing posts that might fall foul of obscenities, toxicity, racism etc rules you have. All that stuff is helpful to moderators by doing a first pass so they don’t have to.
Where the problem lies, though, is in the generative stuff. It cannot be trusted to return facts, it cannot be trusted to return or retain information, it does not learn things beyond what its owners teach it. And frankly I think there are few uses of generative AI that are useful for forums - the heart of forums is people talking to each other, and generative AI doesn’t help with that.
What value can you bring, in most cases, where you’re producing content that isn’t made by humans for humans? There are some specific edge cases - support forums where you can trust it has been fed things that are useful to you and where it can have a go at a first attempt at helping. I have seen it used for sparring in collaborative storytelling - where you want to write with someone but noone’s around, so you write back and forth with generative AI (though I’d submit this is not only a niche use but the majority of such communities that practice collaborative storytelling actively do not want this)
But generative AI has few real uses for a forum. Categorical ones have more uses.
Honestly, I think AI in the consumer side, is nothing but a detriment to society.
I mean, already people think twitter x is news lol.
Sound bites are more informative than articles.
Nobody know how to write in cursive.
And ask someone to do some long division by hand.
Yeah, let AI give us more tools so we dont need to know as much.
edit to add: sorry, got off topic on my pedestal
I mean, already people think twitter x is news lol.
Sound bites are more informative than articles.
Nobody know how to write in cursive.
And ask someone to do some long division by hand.
Yeah, let AI give us more tools so we dont need to know as much.
edit to add: sorry, got off topic on my pedestal
Last edited:
Shawn Gossman
Community Enthusiast
Rating - 0%
I think AI can be used as a resourceful tool for community admins.
But I think once you use it to create your content or members, then you kill what a community is altogether.
I think if forums owners jump on a trend of really using AI for all the content and membership of their forums - that might be the one thing that kills forums for good.
I have a Facebook group with nearly 50,000 members. It's super active and popular. FB and me had a secret Zoom meeting LOL about AI bots in groups. After it got officially released, I asked my audience if they wanted me to utilize it and even the social media crowd was against it.
I think more people are against AI that what everyone thinks.
But I think once you use it to create your content or members, then you kill what a community is altogether.
I think if forums owners jump on a trend of really using AI for all the content and membership of their forums - that might be the one thing that kills forums for good.
I have a Facebook group with nearly 50,000 members. It's super active and popular. FB and me had a secret Zoom meeting LOL about AI bots in groups. After it got officially released, I asked my audience if they wanted me to utilize it and even the social media crowd was against it.
I think more people are against AI that what everyone thinks.
AI is a tool to help humans learn. The sooner the majority realise this, the better.
AI is currently nowhere near good enough to produce reliable, quality content that would serve any useful purpose on forums, beyond very niche uses like previously mentioned perhaps on a support forum or such. I doubt if AI will be good enough in the next 5-10 years to be able to be used for active participation in forums, that being said I don't rule it out altogether, the advancements in technology even in just the last 20 years have been unbelievable imo.
AI is currently nowhere near good enough to produce reliable, quality content that would serve any useful purpose on forums, beyond very niche uses like previously mentioned perhaps on a support forum or such. I doubt if AI will be good enough in the next 5-10 years to be able to be used for active participation in forums, that being said I don't rule it out altogether, the advancements in technology even in just the last 20 years have been unbelievable imo.
Shawn Gossman
Community Enthusiast
Rating - 0%
I think having an AI bot on the forum would be pretty cool.
Something to play games with or chat within the shoutbox.
Shot box addon makers need to consider that as a feature!!
But I feel like the AI needs to be clearly labeled as an AI; otherwise, you're pretty much-taking advantage of your members. Am I wrong?
Perhaps a playground only like a forum games section, but not necessarily in a main forum section. Especially since it can risk a site’s seo in the long wrong.
With some of the threads set to “noindex”, so it doesn’t effect your forum’s overall seo.
Mass producing AI content isn’t a great idea.
Like as you can see from this chart, this particular forum used AI(had high traffic) then a huge declined occured.
Human content is the way to go as it’ll help us stay ahead of the game as forums were built for humans, not AI systems & bots.
There’s already far too many forums opening up twisting the word “community” around by using 3-6 AI bots just to feed their community. This isn’t the way to go and makes forums look bad.
Social media is already using AI bots, however, we’re not social media. It’s up to us to be different and unique & lead by example.
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