Telling. Meta automatically AI-enabled our highly-convivial, 2014-established, 2.9k member FB group - a core, grassroots, intelligence-sharing and collaborative organizing platform for hands-on, mostly PNW-based, regenerative designers. So we took a poll. The result? Unanimous.
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Pearl just asked an important question. Do we want this group Al-enabled? I turned the feature off - automatically added by the folks at Meta - for now. We have three options.: 1) No Al-enabling 2) Chat 1:1 People can chat 1:1 with the group's Al. 3) Comment: The group's Al will automatically respond to posts with relevant past group content. I'm a hard no on 3. Living conversations between real people are an essential glue and feature here. Precisely the same could be said for 2) even as a simply vast array of extremely useful anecdotal intelligence is to be found in past, ‘lost’ conversations here. Are we primarily an information forum, or do we stand for something else? I believe Pearl's primary objection relates to Al's ecological cost. Feelings, folks?
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I don't see any value in it that's worth the ecological cost. Since Al is really an information aggregate based on statistics, a good portion of its information is false (the answer it "thinks" people would say based on internet responses). This is useless in many places, but downright dangerous in spaces discussing plants and growing methods - it just tried to auto implement in a local foraging group for example. Nevermind the ecological cost That garbage got auto-enabled. For the record, | had already opted the group out of this and disabled one other time when it said it was being enabled. This time it was stealth enabled. Dead Internet theory is real folks “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” - Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay... While Al is interesting and may be indispensable one day; it often does not get things right. I'd say no.
@reggaj FB's still exemplary for co-ordinating dynamic, face-to-face projects. If conversations stay public (rather than ingroups peeling out to group PM) the UI powerfully supports (a sense of) democratic involvement. FB local town groups tend to be populous and incredibly responsive.
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