When AI and Community Collide
We Don't Do Use AI
Kelly: Okay, Carrie. You and I are different when it comes to AI. You are someone who reads about it and uses it, whereas I am someone who… doesn’t. I’m scared! So tell me what I’m missing. How do you personally use AI these days? How is it supporting or changing your community work?
Carrie: You use AI constantly! For instance, we both use it when we interview community members by including our Grain call recorder. It joins the call, records it, creates a transcript, and pulls out highlights and important themes for us. And you use it within Google Docs and Gmail when it autocompletes your sentences. AI is nothing new, but its embeddedness in almost every application or device we use is. The fact that you don’t have to think about it is what has sped its adoption so much since 2022.
"AI is nothing new, but its embeddedness in almost every application or device we use is."
Here are the tools I love: I use Grain, as I mentioned. I have Grammarly to read over and improve my emails. I often ask Claude (my favorite chatbot for writing) to come up with new community ideas for me based on past ones and the community compass we’ve created. Circle, our community platform, has an AI content tool I plan to use later this year. I also have a chatbot I’ve named CMJ ModBot that helps me moderate our community.
At the same time, AI’s application is not without significant risks. For specifics, I highly recommend the books Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini, and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality. Organizations are already using AI to make life-altering decisions, such as who gets a job, who gets funded, who gets policed, whose record gets flagged for further inspection, and who qualifies for housing. The lack of accountability for AI’s wrongdoing is an imminent threat to our local communities. Dr. Buolamwini’s Algorithmic Justice League is fighting that, but we all have a role to play in the meantime in reporting these incidents and questioning who benefits from AI applications and whose data is available to train models (and whose is not).
"The lack of accountability for AI’s wrongdoing is an imminent threat to our local communities."
Where AI Meets Community
Kelly: Point taken! I do love Grain. What are you seeing regarding how AI is partaking in, disrupting, or expanding how we think of community?
Carrie: It’s noisy out there. Late last year, I studied 12 AI companies LinkedIn deemed “hot” (not including OpenAI). Seven had communities on Discord, Facebook, or their own proprietary forums. Two were themselves communities. Like their tech predecessors, many use the term “community” when discussing public policy, customer support, email lists, Instagram pages, etc. There is still a lack of understanding and investment in community-building, including ecosystem development, relationship building/maintenance, and redressing harm, which is disappointing. The power of community building for AI development cannot be overstated.
"The power of community building for AI development cannot be overstated."
I was just at SXSW and listened to countless talks on AI—pretty much every speaker addressed it at some point. From those discussions, I see a number of important roles community building can play in the AI industry that all boils down to helping technologists develop, test, and reduce the harm of new applications in a transformative way. There is much discussion about needing to test with more diverse groups - community builders know how to do that in a way that isn't transactional. Some examples:
Identifying risks of applications alongside end users and researchers
Developing and sharing stories of use cases for when AI is most helpful to organizations
Testing new products in a far more robust way than tech companies typically do
Reducing and redressing real harm that will happen to physical communities where servers are located—the environmental impact of AI will be devastating without this lens
The big picture is this: AI is here. XR (extended reality) is here. Together, they will enable those who can afford it to escape our physical reality and build new digital worlds. Simultaneously, advertisers will know, based on sensors in our technology and on our bodies, what we want before we even know we want it.
"The big picture is this: AI is here. XR is here."
The influence of AI and XR will have long-lasting effects on how we interact with other people, the natural world, governments, and for-profit organizations. Disconnecting from others and consuming without intention will be easier than ever. As community builders, it is important for us to model, teach, and create space for people to connect authentically.
A lot can go wrong. We can help mitigate risks and harms, but we have to see our role as bigger than we typically see it.
Kelly: Is this part of a larger pattern—that an emergent or “hot” industry feels a need to “create community” but goes about it the wrong way? Why does this happen? And what’s the missed opportunity?
Carrie: I see it as part of a larger pattern. Commercial interests did not heavily influence the early waves of digital community-building in the 80s and 90s. However, by the early 2000s, for-profit organizations started understanding online spaces' commercial power. For example, when I was 16, a San Francisco tech company offered to pay me in GAP gift cards to post links to their events in Internet forums. They knew posting in these groups would grow their reach, and if they paid someone else, they could fake authenticity.
The mainstream understanding of the power of communities in businesses is still limited. Many for-profit businesses focus on meeting their financial targets every quarter, leading to a transactional mindset where they extract all they can to optimize their profits. I hope that the AI industry can adopt a transformational approach that prioritizes rebuilding trust rather than only focusing on maximizing profits, but most organizations will prioritize short-term financial incentives. As a realist, this issue keeps me up at night, but I still maintain hope.
Now we want to know: What do YOU think of the AI industry and its application (or lack of application) of community building? What can we do to make progress in a more positive direction?
Thank you to subscriber Alex Witkowski for suggesting this topic. Did you know you can suggest topics for us to discuss? Just hit reply and let us know what you want to learn!
Subscribe to Get Our Future Newsletters!
Don’t miss out on updates, explorations, and future topics. Sign up below:
