The discussion centers on community norms and rules around using AI to generate entire forum topics. BennyBoy_Alpha expresses concern that AI-written topics lacking human review feel inauthentic and lazy. merefield agrees, criticizing “AI slop” — unedited, overly formatted content — as inconsiderate to readers, though acknowledging AI’s potential value when used responsibly. sam provides helpful resources, including discussions on AI spam, flagging tools for undisclosed AI content, community sentiment on ChatGPT, AI-assisted moderation, and general AI integration in Discourse. Falco clarifies that Discourse, as open-source software, doesn’t impose rules on individual instances — but at meta.discourse.org, AI-generated off-topic or spam content is prohibited, and a user was recently banned for such behavior. The consensus leans toward valuing human oversight and transparency when using AI in forum content creation.
Hey!
What are the current rules surrounding writing entire topics using AI. As a human discourse forum, in my opinions it feels like a sour taste in the mouth when someone just writes an entire educational topic using AI with no effort at all into whether its actually accurate or not.
Imho, it’s certainly a matter of taste and brevity.
On one of my regular forums I see people posting Post after Post with huge overly-formatted “AI slop” that they likely haven’t fully vetted or in any way attempted to edit to make them more easily consumed. I really dislike it when someone appears to “fully outsource” their argument to AI. It feels lazy and inconsiderate to the reader who is somehow expected to do the review of their AI cut & paste for them.
Don’t get me wrong, AI has a useful contribution to make to forums (I wrote two of the first three AI plugins for Discourse) but the way people use it has to be moderated.
Helpful resources:
AI triage was particularly helpful here, see the above links
Discourse, as open source software cant and won’t impose rules to instances whose only relationship are using the software.
If you are asking about rules regarding AI here, at meta.discourse.org, we banned a user doing it yesterday.
Off topic and spam are not welcome, either organic or synthetic.