Examining Our Collective Relationship With AI - a Conversation With Venessa Paech
It is time to become more curious and critical about our relationship with AI
Venessa Paech is an internationally regarded online community strategist with over 25 years of experience building community online. Venessa is also a PhD candidate studying the intersection of AI and community, and a global authority on communities and community management.
In the first Cohere episode of 2023, Venessa joins Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas to discuss the quickly evolving role of AI in our digital experiences, how AI is currently playing a role in online communities, and what the future may hold regarding our collective relationship with AI.
Key Quote
"It's still a relationship business. It's just we now have relationships with tools and machines in a new way: in a more anthropomorphized way and in ways that mimic our own thinking and behavior sufficiently that we do need to recontextualize them. So how do we do that in a way that still prioritizes and centers the human work of what we're doing and brings us to those core community protocols of: How are we building a healthy, thriving, constructive space for constituents? is it accessible? Is it productive in meaningful ways? Is it relevant? And honoring the context, always honoring our context, which is one of the biggest problems we do see with so many different sorts of automated and or AI tools, is they tend to flatten and standardize context because that is how they operate. … But for community, which is typically a smaller, more intimate, and more nuanced sort of cluster of relations and ties, that does not work.”
-Venessa Paech
On power and context
“The question is always about those power relations. I think about how the human or the tool is doing the work, whether that is generating words, generating images, generating messages, having conversations - whether they are appreciative of and embedded in that context, in a respectful and constructive way, or whether they are disassociated or decoupled from that [context]. … There may be some context where the risks are greater if there is a lack of human oversight.”
On the importance of taking a systems perspective
“I’m thinking about AI as a set of components within a larger system: So it is a systems lens rather than this idea of an atomized relationship between a human and their tool or tools. And I keep coming back to - when it comes to communities - core community principles and protocols. And I think we would be perhaps wise to do that, especially in this transitional era where much is undiscovered and there is a lot of volatility from an ethical point of view.”
The need for more nuanced thinking about moderation
“We want to get into the real nuances of moderation, which are largely undiscussed. We think of moderation in these very black and white terms, particularly when it comes to the type of stuff that makes the news or is discussed in the wider discourse. Moderation tends to be focused on individuals like commercial content moderators, and rightly so, but it leaves out a very wide spectrum of moderation as a practice: its importance, the challenges within it, and how it fits into these broader issues of ethics, platform culture, and AI.”
The benefits of generative AI
“My element of surprise here is that generative AI does a pretty good job. I came into this a lot more skeptical about its abilities in that regard, and for certain tasks in this arena, it is clear now that it is going to be perfectly adequate, and assuming this technology set will evolve, refine, and improve, it could be really great. … And so I suppose this is an example of the framing of AI as burden reducing, which I think is something I've also latched onto as a potential way it should be applied and perhaps a driving ethical vector.”
Prioritizing relationships over technology
“Who are we serving and why? What is the shared value we are seeking to generate? Who is thinking about culture and the way it's constituted? What are those boundaries and how are they being maintained? What is the social infrastructure of that community? And that [the answers to those questions] is always more important than the platform and technical infrastructure of that community. “
Resources From This Episode:
All things In Moderation Conference: https://www.allthingsinmoderation.org/call-for-papers
SWARM (Australia’s Community Management Conference): https://swarmconference.com.au/
Australian Community Managers: https://www.australiancommunitymanagers.com.au/
Books:
Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford
Building Brand Communities: How Organizations Succeed by Creating Belonging by Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
The Accidental Community Manager: A Guide to Building a Successful B2B Community by Adrian Speyer
Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds-And How It Promises to Transform Society by Howard Rheingold
Venessa’s scholarship:
Where to find Venessa:
