Has AI Resuscitated Online Forums?
With AI, verification issues, and a demand for genuine human responses. Will small online forums make a return?
I was sat off in the depression inducing experience that is twitter/X. When I came across a series of screenshots. From adding glue to improve the consistency of cheese [1] to forgetting the existence of Kenya. Its been an interesting week of using and viewing others using Google. Its safe to say that AI integration with search has been a planetary sized cockup.
All of these searches have something in common, the AI was cited fairly well on troll comments on Reddit. Its not to difficult to understand where the confusion has come from. Clearly a shortcut had occurred where upvotes were aligned as a quality score as if it was a rational product review. It clearly did not take into consideration that people also upvote comments and posts that are funny, sarcastic or entertainingly moronic. Mixed with the keyword usage of the post and the search. It is safe to say that AI is behaving in a very logical way to a very illogical world (of which the internet is a mirror reflection).
For close to nearly two years, to get a decent search response I have had to add reddit to my search queries. From technical questions, work related searches and the random history or videogame questions I randomly come up with. I have done this as a result of the poor search experience that seems to be the modern search engine, with content being served being AI generated, little or no value or not at all being related. With many sites seemingly being made off AI responses to AI articles from other cycles, a Habsburg doom cycle of AI.
But where do forums come in?
Reddit effectively replaced the microforms of different hobbies and interests. With ease of changing topics, very accessible to find new topics and items being easily linked across topic discussions. It makes perfect sense, no need to try and work out which forum site would have the most relevant topics across a spectrum of sites with varied levels of depth or sizes of active community. r/historian for example has the broad range of knowledge but can be linked to more specific pages if you were more interested in a specific point in history such as world war two. These smaller forum sites for the most part effectively died as reddit grew.
In the last five years, it seems that this is evolving, with groups on discord expanding with hyper active groups building and growing. But this is not a great replacement. The lack of indexing on search engines and the changing pace of conversations due to time zones (for example) leading to difficulty in the future if people are trying to find information.
This is where I think smaller micro-forums would have the potential to return. But with several conditions. Notably these are.
- Verification of users
Anonymous of users to maintain anonymity publicly facing but enabling the site to identify and ban users posting AI questions and responses. This would lower the usage of AI, spammers and malicious posters.
- Indexed on search engines
Accessible to people searching online this will lead in time to the growth of the sites to wider members of the public.
- Degrees of Specialisations
Because of the smaller scope of the sites it’ll lead to these sites becoming more recognisable. To uses and people searching for answers. It should also be easier for marketeers to advertise on the sites to enable their sustainable growth and lifespan.
- AI detection and prevention
To ensure the highest quality of content and discussions, its clear that this will need to be addressed. But also become of the maintained consequences we can now see with AI.
AI is destroying sentiment analysis in research
A key area of AI is effecting but not at all discussing is in research, specifically sentiment analysis.
Where comments, posts and articles are fed into software that uses keywords and a attached sentiment (negative, neutral and positive in very simple terms). to determine the audiences sentiments towards the piece.
With ever decreasing budgets for research (if there was even one) at universities staff, students, corporate and independent researchers have used sentiment analysis to gain insights into the audience and the public. This was done on the assumption that it was a person commenting, that it was a genuine response and that anonymity online enabled people to comment what they actually think.
With AI responses in comment sections (linkedin) uses LLM such as chatgpt. Researches can now not take for granted that the responses is a human response or that it is infact a genuine thought (that they themselves thought off).
Verification and AI detection would go a long way to solving this issue. Providing a more beneficial search engine experience for searchers. The solution seems clear, a human internet, is clearly what will provide the best human experience. AI while it can imitate, does not provide a genuine human experience.
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ai-glue-pizza-i-tried-it-2024-5
