What does AI bring to conversations among humans?

[Falco]

@hellekin

Since the focus for the upcoming Discourse release is announced to be AI, I’d like to take the opportunity to question this choice. After all, Discourse is made to support “thoughtful discussion and meaningful connections”.

While we did use the word focus there, in my opinion more because of historical reasons, those are the internal teams we created to work in different areas of the Discourse ecosystem.

We do have a team focused in AI since March, where I’m the tech lead. We did a heavily experimental cycle during Discourse 3.1 so we are coming back again on the 3.2 cycle to add polish to the features we got good feedback from our users.

The idea is to still keep everything under the DiscourseAI, which keeps anyone not using the plugin shielded from any bugs introduced by it, and benefits everyone using Discourse as we create and exercise the software extensibility.

@hellekin

especially as humans seems to be requiring much less water over time for much better conversations.

(citation needed)

@hellekin

Since the AI field is mostly dominated by huge corporations with deep pockets

I think you will be happy to hear that for this cycle we expend a large amount of time making every module compatible with open source models, so even the most powerful features can be ran in a GPU that you can find in a gamer PC.

That’s been a huge point for me, that we will not make features that are completely dependent on third parties, and I’m super happy with the progress we made here.

@hellekin

Sure, this is not for everyone, and probably appropriate if you have millions of users and must deal with that throwing more power at it…

That’s true, why would you want AI moderation for a instance among friends? But it may be a deal maker/breaker for a instance where a lonely CM tries to handle a oversized community with a small team.

Discourse at scale is something we care about too, otherwise we’re leaving huge swats of the online communication for the walled gardens, and you don’t want that.

@hellekin

But what happens to consent?

Nothing changes here: what you post in a Discourse instance is subject to that specific instance rules. If said instance prints your posts and sends it as postcards to unsuspecting grandma’s, they may need to make that explicit on their terms. Same for AI.

For the AI plugin, most of the “share with AI” flow is user initiated. You can ask AI to proofread, translate, etc. You can ask AI to summarize. Meanwhile bulk actions, like embeddings computation that power semantic related topics and semantic search are, by default, computed using OpenSource models that can be hosted in the same machines where you are running Discourse and safe from third parties.

@JammyDodger

I think what has won me over is how useful using the AI-based tools to help out with the everyday stuff has been.

And that’s has always been my plan on this project. It’s about building tools to make people conversation easier and reducing chores. Not about talking to machines.