Possibilities with AI in Community (AIiC)

There were many excellent discussions at a recent Community Manager’s Unconference.

During one session we carved out the basics of a model for AI and its relationship with community. Let’s call it AI in Community (AIiC).

As a Community Builder/Manager you could use AIiC to:

  1. Spark creativity
  2. Spot patterns and provide insight
  3. Create connection opportunities

Some examples:

  1. You want to ask your community some questions yet you’ve run out of ideas and worry you’ll ask the same sort of questions. So you ask an AI to give you a set of questions related to a topic in the style of Shakespeare.
  2. You know that your community is talking about a particular topic yet can’t pinpoint the key themes and opportunities to keep the conversation going. You could use AI to highlight those themes for you and suggest community content to share.
  3. Your community onboarding could ask some questions. And use those answers to say something like, ā€œname likes to talk about topic, here’s more info about them and a thing they did.ā€ Or someone asks ā€œI need help with thing?ā€ and the AI knows who to suggest.

ā€œSpark Creativityā€ is doable right now. I’m unsure about the tooling to support ā€œSpot patternsā€ and ā€œCreate Connection Opportunitiesā€ yet I’m keen to see it happen in the community tooling world.

Maybe there’s a spreadsheet hack I’m yet to work out. :sweat_smile:

Anyhow, AI in Community isn’t going anywhere and while we need to be aware of AI’s biases and risks, the possibilities are limitless.

How about you, how do you/could you use AI to support your role as a Community Builder/Manager?

Let’s build two lists.

  • One with real examples of what’s doable right now. :ballot_box_with_check:
  • And one for what we’d like to see possible in the future. :crystal_ball:
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I also really like the idea of using AI to update members on what’s happened since they were last in the community.

The question of cost in all of this also looms large.

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Oh yes, I think this could be interesting. Now I’m wondering what would actually be useful for people to know that they’ve missed without the experience being overwhelming or dismissed as not useful.

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If you’re serious about examples and a list, I could create a wiki page here in the ā€˜garden’ that we can add to as ideas arise, or examples are seen in action.

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Great idea!

I had in mind that we could see where this post goes and if it started a deeper convo then I’d recommend we create a wiki page. I do love a good wiki page on :tulip: Community Garden .

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This was something I had in the newsletter this week.

I guess this could be categorised as ā€˜AI assisted content creation’ :slight_smile:

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We’ve been testing a lot of things, in a few we’re gonna roll out some of these to production.

Random ideas for Community (or Support as we see a lot of these overlapping)

  • Allow moderators to take their traditionally canned responses used for Support and convert each into a unique response (ChatGPT actually helps create a more human experience?).
  • Automatically generate responses to assist our moderators (AI generates the response to a topic, moderators can review and edit before submission). Again, Support may be a better use case for this long term.
  • Chatbot for support to replace our existing Chatbot
  • Academy quizzes - ChatGPT is amazing at generating a knowledge test on the fly, you can even choose how you want to respond such as multiple choice or not. Apparently ChatGPT 4 makes this wildly better
  • Coaching - Our Academy coaches help a lot of users with generating profiles for our platform. We’re looking at using ChatGPT to not necessarily build profiles for users, but educate them on the best ways. Take data we have and spit out examples, or ideally, have them write it first then have ChatGPT provide analysis on it to improve it.
  • Onboarding assistant!!!
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I’ve just asked ChatGPT to summarise the first five topics on a Discourse category page. The results were great. Thinking it could be an interesting way to resurface forum discussions by providing a ā€œway inā€ beyond just the topic post title. In other words, create a new topic which signposts people to discussions within the category they are looking at.

Or perhaps run the same ChatGPT task across multiple categories limited by post date e.g. the previous month. I imagine you could then create a ā€œWhat’s being discussed?ā€ summary post to provide a summary of discussions had during the last month. (And then pin the topic post for those new to the forum :thinking: )

Will give it a try and see what happens.

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Not community related, but it’s always interesting to see how other platforms are thinking about the impact of AI.

Here’s an example from Medium.

It’s interesting to direct AI to content within the community and directly repurpose/edit/draft that. I can imagine getting good value from that.

I think where it goes wrong is content writers asking random things and relying on the whole of the internet as data points.

I was just reading this :sweat_smile:

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Under what is doable right now…does addressing spam/problems come under it?

Here’s a couple things I read recently:

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:studio_microphone: Another idea related to voice synthesis.

  1. Use ChatGPT/Bard to write whatever for us, make necessary tweaks
  2. Use a tool like ElevenLabs to synthesise our voice
  3. Add whatever text to the voice tool
  4. Share voice recording wherever appropriate.

It could be a quick community update, via a newsletter, a social question, a voice version of a forum post etc.

Could it save us time? I reckon it could if the synthesis is spot on.

Have a listen to the two audio tests in this folder.

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Thanks for sharing, Rosie.

The thread on meta.discourse.org is interesting, particularly Sam Saffron’s (Discourse’s co-founder, for those unfamiliar with this person) take on things. The ā€œAIā€ fog.

Something doable right now. :ballot_box_with_check:

Simplify the grabbing of content to schedule.

Here are some simple requests. For sure it would require refinement yet there’s potential there. For example, if you happen to use a scheduling tool like Buffer perhaps you could output it in a way to hook up it via their API.



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For this one it has summarised the text, which makes it dead boring to read.

I guess you need ask it something more specific, eg: create a list of the 3 best points

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Absolutely, it defo needs refinement (as I’d mentioned). It was just a demonstration of how simple it is to quickly grab stuff from an existing website.

Perhaps we could create a list of prompt options here to encourage ChatGPT to return something moderately creative and engaging – to at least get us started for us to tweak in whatever way we like. For example:

  • for each item, share three of the most useful points
  • in the style of Seth Godin
  • include at least three emoji
  • add a joke or pun to some of the summaries
  • explain who wrote it and why they are awesome
  • summarise each in less than 10 words

What else?

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I’m getting a bit closer

EDIT:

I used the above, edited it and posted a tweet.

Oh this is a game changer!! :slight_smile:

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I’ve been starting to look at coaching possibilities with ChatGPT a lot deeper. It really is scary how well it can pretend to be someone else.

For example, just prime ChatGPT to be who you want.

ā€œYou are Coaching Bot 3000. You are a coaching instructor on Upwork’s Community team. You will role play with me. I am a freelancer. I want to land a new job. You will converse back and forth with me as I attempt to convince you I am the best. You should start the conversation by asking me about my profile and providing feedback and questions based from it.

Job: Need someone to build me a website about cats. My budget is $3000. I need it done within the next 3 weeksā€

Boom. ChatGPT will now converse with you no different than a human would. Not only will it do that, it will tell you when you are being to sarcastic and you don’t get the job. Which is me. Since I am a sarcastic ass. I started doing tests yesterday to compare real world scenarios we’ve had against the bot. I’m honestly not sure who did better.

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You inspired me to try using it as a leadership coach. The prompt I used similar to your was.

You are a Leadership coach in the style of Brene Brown with a focus on compassionate leadership. You will role play with me. I want to me able to give feedback on my community ambassadors who are not engaged as I would like and are showing what could be considered poor performance. You should start the conversation with an issue you face in your leadership community and what you have done. You should look to understand my issue and use coaching techniques to help me come up with a solution.

It was one of the most honest and raw conversations I had. Remarkable.

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