What is stopping you from trying out Discourse AI?

We run a small creative community for interactive fiction fans, creators, authors, and artists. We don’t usually run into problems where the moderation duties are too great, and our mods and many of our community are happy to answer questions. So we wouldn’t use AI to “do forum work”.

While we often discuss AI in the context of “text generation” as it relates to the games we create and many people are interested in it, we have made a rule that actual AI generated content is not allowed to be posted in a situation where an AI construct is “pretending” to be a real forum user and trying to fool people in an attempt to pass the Turing test. We do not want our forum used as a testing ground for AI nor our historical content back from 2006 used a field to scrape for text content.

If people post AI generated material either for their own purposes as a writing assistant or as a demonstration for a game they are building, we ask them to disclaim what it is or cite it like a source as it is not technically “their own” material. We’ve had several spammers that tried to participate and raise trust levels by (I assume) feeding a topic to an AI like ChatGPT and posting the results so it would seem like legitimate forum participation. Since our entire genre of art is creating a text work that “responds” to interaction by a user (Think text adventures like Zork) most people can peg content that is machine generated pretty easily and flag it.

An AI or LLM cannot agree to the Terms of Service and Code of Conduct. If it happens to offend anyone there’s no way to moderate it. Since we expect our users to be transparent about this type of content, it would probably be hypocritical for our site to use any sort of AI generation for forum content and responses.

We also had to quell a flame war that threatened to erupt because many of our users are graphic artists who are very sensitive about their online works being stolen as source material for AI art, and a topic about using AI art in games quickly devolved into personal attacks against people who were okay with it. So AI is one of the subjects we have to watch closely to make sure it’s not discussed in the context of willful plagiarism.

TL;DR: AI is a hot button issue that we had to make rules about so we probably shouldn’t use it in the context of a forum populated by lots of artists and writers.

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