At OggaDoon, we’re always looking for opportunities to broaden our knowledge and keep up-to-date on industry trends. We’ve got our eyes open for any relevant seminars, events, discussions and news. In this article, our PR & Marketing Executive Nea shares her notes from the latest webinar she attended – a conversation about AI with expert panellists Venessa Paech of Australian Community Managers, Richard Millington of FeverBee, Gregor Young of Guild and Blaise Grimes-Viort of Is The Answer.
The webinar was centered around a discussion about online communities and the technology used for managing them. It covered the topics of opportunities, risks, and practical applications of Artificial Intelligence in online community management, as well as the predicted impact of AI on the community management industry.
How should we talk about AI?
When defining broad principles for talking about AI, the speakers agreed that while there are serious risks to consider – regarding diversity, learned biases, and safety concerns, for example – these worries are not AI-specific but apply to many other new innovations and societal trends as well. The consensus was that there are many unknowns when it comes to AI, and it’s impossible to tell what will happen in the future or how the current discourse around the topic will be viewed a few years down the line.
Similarly, all panellists believed that it will likely take a couple more years for any proper regulations in the field to kick in. The experts agreed that the impact of AI on our society and economy depends entirely on what’s done with the technology, rather than the technology itself. Some fields, like customer service and ecommerce, will inevitably be more impacted in comparison to community management where the emphasis is more on making connections and networking between people.
Solutions for the future
Gregor Young, CEO of professional community and networking platform Guild, shed light on what their organisation is currently working on. He described their solutions for the future as having a strong focus on the ability of AI to summarise and categorise content and users in online communities. He highlighted the potential to encourage involvement and engagement, for example by helping users overcome language barriers or assisting them in finding the correct tone for what they want to say in order to lower the threshold for communicating with others in public.
But can an AI create, launch, and monitor communities by itself? Where does the need for human touch come in? The speakers agreed that AI tools are good at helping with communications of massive volume and velocity and were hopeful that data analysis in general can be democratised and access to it made easier through AI. The technology excels at measuring community engagement, conducting sentiment analysis and social network analysis – inspecting which users are most influential and what kind of groups are forming around which topics. Predicting a rise in new types of collaborations and community building tools, Young said: “AI doesn’t power community building, but assists in it.”
The speakers agreed that while questions that require personal experience or emotional support to be resolved should be human-moderated, others will benefit from AI. The consensus is that the value of these human interactions and trust in people is a more pressing concern than the stereotypical worry that “AI will take our jobs” – according to the experts, a user not knowing if they’re speaking to a person or a machine, and the trust and safety aspect that comes into play with this, is a more important question than the possibility of human workers being replaced by AI.
When discussing whether knowledge of AI will become a necessity for community moderators in the future, Richard Millington, founder of community consultancy FeverBee, compared the new technology to email which, when first introduced, simply made some tasks easier and relieved time for other things. “AI is not a replacement tech”, he said. “However, some jobs will likely change to align with AI, and new professions – such as prompt engineering – will pop up.”
Risks and opportunities
In a Q&A with the panellists, multiple questions were raised regarding the pros and cons of AI in community management. When asked the question “When is AI most useful?”, Venessa Paech, Director of Australian Community Managers and a leading strategist in her field, recommended four distinctive ways of thinking about AI and what it can do:
1) Reduce harm
2) Automate burdens
3) Organise meaning
4) Deepen insights.
Stating that AI at its current stage is an ideal tool for lower-lever administration tasks and other work that is repetitive and time consuming, she said: “AI is most impactful when it is allowed to train itself with a high amount of data for something that requires a high level of precision, or when the machine is trained with a smaller amount of data for tasks that require a lower level of precision.”
Questions regarding AI’s potential for preventing harassment and hate speech were also brought up. When considering the safety issues related to AI, the panellists agreed that the chance of the technology being used to create and spread misinformation is one of the most serious concerns. “A big issue is the possibility of making up fictional information about real people,” summarised Blaise Grimes-Viort, founder and managing director of consulting firm Is The Answer. However, the panellists also believe that AI can greatly help human community moderators in communications and reduce harm by automating much of the burden of monitoring harmful content.
According to Venessa Paech, AI is good at picking up so-called “black and white” cases of inappropriate communications – like extremely graphic content or direct death threats – but struggles when it comes to nuance. “The current problem is that AI makes a lot of standardised assumptions about concepts that can be very culturally dependent. Running the risk of homogenising online communities to the point of creating echo chambers can result in completely new threats and challenges.”
Interested in listening to the webinar yourself? An ungated replay of the event can be found on the Guild website.
Marketing and communities go hand-in-hand – read our article on brand communities, why they matter, and how to harness their power here.
For more insights into topics ranging from the ins and outs of crowdfunding to cyber security marketing and our clients working with AI, discover more articles by our team in the OggaDoon blog – or drop us a message to find out how we can work together.
