AI in Discourse: keep or disable?

Users
1

Hello Chapel Users and Developers —

A few Chapel community members have recently proposed turning off some of
the AI features that are enabled in Discourse by default, such as the
"summarize" button on discussions. Here, I wanted to check and see
whether other Discourse users felt particularly passionately about either
keeping these features on or turning them off. Let us know your thoughts.

Thanks,
-Brad

2

Hi Brad: I never use AI intentionally, mostly because (maybe naively) I like to know as much as possible the reasons why things work or not. Having AI give me info whose inner workings are not very clear is something that I tend to dislike. On the other hand, whenever I search in Google, it forces AI on me, and often the answers are helpful and faster than the old way. In ths case, I am not as proud as too dismiss useful information :slight_smile: This said, I have nothing fundamental against AI being there, if there is the option either to use it or not.

Cheers

Nelson

3

Some AI summaries are less than helpful or worse. I tend to turn it off if I can in case it is wrong. My 2c.

4

I turn off AI everywhere. I feel it should be be off by default.

5

While I'm not too bothered by this button's presence personally since I can choose not to click it, I think in general having such a button is bad for the quality of the forum, because it gives participants an easy alternative to reading posts carefully.

6

Thanks for the opinions everyone. I've turned off the summary button for now because "off" seems to be the preference of the majority (including some developers not represented here)—or at least not objected to—and also feels like the more conservative thing to do in terms of sharing our conversations, using energy, etc. I also agree with what others have said about preferring to interact with humans rather than humans' perceptions of conversations based on AI, particularly given that most of our conversations here are fairly straighforward (well, for a technical reader at least). Nothing precludes someone from feeding one of these conversations into an AI agent of their choice if they need a summary, of course, and that's fine.

If others' opinion differs strongly here in the future, we can take this back up again or open an issue for it. I just wanted to take the temperature before proceeding.

Thanks again,
-Brad

1 Like
7

Thanks again for the input here, Nelson, Damian, Praveen, and Anna. Having turned off the "summarize" button, I went to see what other AI was enabled on our Discourse, and found some other things, such as:

  • the button that suggests a subject line for a post, given the text of the post
  • the button that suggests a category for a post, given the text of the post
  • the button that will translate to English, proofread your text, generate markdown tables, or help with dates

and am wondering about whether your previous characterizations apply to these as well (for those who were similarly pretty focused on the summarize buttons.

My own opinion is that the first two seem pretty silly and superfluous to me, such that I would just disable them without a thought unless anyone wanted to champion them. The third though is a bit less obvious. It's not something I use, or would use, but maybe others would? Note that I believe each of these can be disabled separately.

So, does anyone want to champion any of these features, or should I turn them all off?

Thanks,
-Brad

8

I think the third option for translation, proofreading, and formatting sounds useful.
If we can allow it as an option without it being too invasive for people who don’t want to use it, that sounds appealing.