(2024-05-20) Ai Chatbots Are Intruding Into Online Communities Where People Are Trying To Connect With Other Humans

AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans. A parent asked a question in a private Facebook group in April 2024: Does anyone with a child who is both gifted and disabled have any experience with New York City public schools? The parent received a seemingly helpful answer... Both of these responses were lies. That child does not exist and neither do the camera or air conditioner. The answers came from an artificial intelligence chatbot.

According to a Meta help page, Meta AI will respond to a post in a group if someone explicitly tags it or if someone “asks a question in a post and no one responds within an hour.” The feature is not yet available in all regions or for all groups

In 1993, Howard Rheingold published the book “The Virtual Community..

The first chapter opens with a parenting question: What to do about a “blood-bloated thing sucking on our baby’s scalp.”

Of this experience, he wrote, “What amazed me wasn’t just the speed with which we obtained precisely the information we needed to know, right when we needed to know it. It was also the immense inner sense of security that comes with discovering that real people – most of them parents, some of them nurses, doctors, and midwives – are available, around the clock, if you need them.”

Decades of research suggests that the human component of online communities is what makes them so valuable for both information-seeking and social support.

The most important benefits of these online spaces as described by our participants could be drastically undermined by responses coming from chatbots instead of people.

A response from a chatbot claiming to speak from the lived experience of caring for a diabetic child, offering empathy, would not only be inappropriate, but it would be borderline cruel.

This isn’t to suggest that chatbots aren’t useful for anything – they may even be quite useful in some online communities, in some contexts.

Responsible AI development and deployment means not only auditing for issues such as bias and misinformation, but also taking the time to understand in which contexts AI is appropriate and desirable for the humans who will be interacting with them