From Human-Centric to AI-Driven: The Future of Forums in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

[hameedacpa]

Forums, in their traditional sense, are on the verge of extinction because the current trend still focuses more on design than content.
The goal of design is to facilitate access to content, encourage its creation, and promote participation through various available methods. In the age of artificial intelligence, AI must be integrated with design in content management, content generation, and even responding to content when necessary.
The absence of this mechanism means we are all heading toward the certain extinction of forums. Therefore, AI must be integrated with forums to enrich them with content and make this content accessible to the audience seeking information, whether through traditional search engines or AI platforms that offer the feature of searching for information and its sources.
I hope that forum platforms will be re-engineered to reflect the modern trend for all users. This is a great opportunity to re-engineer the concept of forums, which was primarily based on human participation. Now, I imagine it should primarily focus on AI-generated content, followed by human-generated content.
We must all wake up before we regret not keeping up with the current advancements happening with the help of artificial intelligence.
@Matt@Ehren@Matt Finger@Ryan Ashbrook@Charles@Lindy

[Charles]

I cannot disagree more.

What we are seeing is a renewed interest from search engines and such in human generated content. Some of our largest clients are putting a lot more resources into fostering their communities as they see people tilting toward wanting to trust that they are interacting with other people rather than bots. This is not just my opinion: it’s backed up by metrics and money spent.

You can get AI generated content literally anywhere which means it adds no value to a community experience. A platform like Invision Community creates a places where humans can share their knowledge, opinion, and experiences.

There is a place for AI in what we do and you will see us adding more AI features soon. But we will focus on AI helping humans discover the best human content for you to enjoy. 

[hameedacpa]

23 minutes ago, Charles said:

I cannot disagree more.

What we are seeing is a renewed interest from search engines and such in human generated content. Some of our largest clients are putting a lot more resources into fostering their communities as they see people tilting toward wanting to trust that they are interacting with other people rather than bots. This is not just my opinion: it’s backed up by metrics and money spent.

You can get AI generated content literally anywhere which means it adds no value to a community experience. A platform like Invision Community creates a places where humans can share their knowledge, opinion, and experiences.

There is a place for AI in what we do and you will see us adding more AI features soon. But we will focus on AI helping humans discover the best human content for you to enjoy. 

What guarantee is there that I, as a human, would share any content on a platform whose continued existence is not assured? The current preference is to share content on social media platforms, and there are platforms that have surpassed this issue, but they are limited, well-known, and heavily supported.

The managerial direction of your platform must change. You are operating with a 1990s and early 2000s mindset, giving priority to human-produced content under the pretext of encouraging human content. I consider this self-deception and a clinging to the classic ideas from when forums were first built.

There needs to be a rethinking of the very purpose of forums. From my perspective, a forum is a platform for sharing content—whether that content is produced by humans or generated by artificial intelligence, which is itself originally rooted in human creation. After all, humans are the source of the content, even if AI makes predictions or generates it.

I believe we are facing a crisis in how we think about forums, their role, and their scope. The time has come for an end to relying solely on human-generated content to enrich forums; the reality now is that content may be created by either humans or AI, whether we like it or not. We cannot escape this fact.

I hope your next product advertisement will be something like this:
“Our forums provide AI compatibility: you can set up AI members to help manage and refine content, assign tags, respond to posts under specific conditions, and produce periodic administrative reports to the human forum administrators to evaluate overall performance on all levels—including server performance, search engine metrics, and the volume and quality of content.”

This is my vision. You can accept it or reject it, but if you reject it, be prepared—unfortunately, you will not have much left to offer in this era.

[Matt]

59 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

What guarantee is there that I, as a human, would share any content on a platform whose continued existence is not assured? The current preference is to share content on social media platforms, and there are platforms that have surpassed this issue, but they are limited, well-known, and heavily supported.

Your needs. Have a problem with your iPhone? Google will show you links to the Apple forum where you can either read from other's experiences or write your own. Car heater stopped working? You post on a forum to ask for advice or places that can fix it (personal experience 🙂). Playing a complex game and need help? There's likely forum links in Google ready to help that you can reply to.

This isn't wishful thinking, it's what is happening every single day.

59 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

The managerial direction of your platform must change. You are operating with a 1990s and early 2000s mindset, giving priority to human-produced content under the pretext of encouraging human content. I consider this self-deception and a clinging to the classic ideas from when forums were first built.

I appreciate you see it as self-deception but all our existing clients do not. Human to human relationships are key to any community. The increase in bland, generic, long-winded and often incorrect AI content has fatigued us to craving genuine connection.
 

59 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

There needs to be a rethinking of the very purpose of forums. From my perspective, a forum is a platform for sharing content—whether that content is produced by humans or generated by artificial intelligence, which is itself originally rooted in human creation. After all, humans are the source of the content, even if AI makes predictions or generates it.

Forums have become more transactional, but I do not really understand your point. If we filled this forum with generic AI content alongside genuine human created content, the human created content would generate more interactions.
 

59 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

I believe we are facing a crisis in how we think about forums, their role, and their scope. The time has come for an end to relying solely on human-generated content to enrich forums; the reality now is that content may be created by either humans or AI, whether we like it or not. We cannot escape this fact.

Again false. Google have started to push forum content above AI content because they are concerned that the AI generated content is not as useful.

59 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

Our forums provide AI compatibility: you can set up AI members to help manage and refine content, assign tags, respond to posts under specific conditions, and produce periodic administrative reports to the human forum administrators to evaluate overall performance on all levels—including server performance, search engine metrics, and the volume and quality of content.

As Charles mentioned, we are researching AI tools to help -- not replace -- humans, so in your example things like:

- Making reports
- Suggestion tags
- Creating summaries
- Helper/reply bot guiding the original poster to more help (looks like you're having an issue with your database, try this article or create a ticket)

Are all valid tools that we have discussed internally.

You mentioned social media platforms, and it’s worth noting that while they’re massive content engines, many are actively seeking alternatives. They’re looking for slower, deeper, and more meaningful exchanges; something forums are uniquely positioned to offer. By leaning into what forums do best, we carve out a space for people who value genuine human connection.

We are an escape from social media and mass produced AI content, not a contributor.

[KT Walrus]

I hate that so many search results these days point to AI generated content. The pages on the internet should all be human generated unless the domain uses the .ai TLD. 

Please don’t be tempted to integrate AI content into Invision Community. 

As a user, I want to read human generated content on the web. If I want an approximate answer, I will use an AI agent.

Nothing would be worse than visiting a forum and later finding out that it is simply a bunch of AI agents discussing amongst themselves. What a waste of time reading content like this. 

[hameedacpa]

I am not trying to push your views toward entirely AI-generated content. On the contrary, what I wanted to highlight is that there should be supportive tools to help create AI-generated content if the forum administrators wish to do so. And if they prefer to prevent it, they should also be free to do so. In other words, what I want is to provide both the tools and freedom to those in charge—namely the forum owners—to do what is best for their forums, rather than leaving control in the hands of the forum software developers to decide the source of the content.

As things stand, we currently have no AI capabilities. It is as if we have, unfortunately, not yet awakened from the coma that the rest of the world suddenly emerged from in 2022, when everyone was hit by a sweeping wave of AI fever.

Forum developers must make AI tools available and leave the decision on how to generate content, choose its source, and integrate it to the forum owners alone, as they alone are responsible for those decisions—not the forum developers.

Now that I have clarified my perspective, what tools for AI integration has your team implemented? If the answer is, “Yes, we discussed it but did not implement anything,” then I regret to say that development is drastically lagging behind. I call upon management to provide the company’s clients with complete transparency, a clear roadmap, and a defined timeline for implementation, so that we can make the right decision at the right time.

[Matt]

"As things stand, we currently have no AI capabilities. It is as if we have, unfortunately, not yet awakened from the coma that the rest of the world suddenly emerged from in 2022, when everyone was hit by a sweeping wave of AI fever."

Not strictly true. Some of our cloud packages come with AI powered image detection and can hold images and posts for moderation if they are NSFW. We also have AI powered spam detection at Enterprise level.

42 minutes ago, hameedacpa said:

Forum developers must make AI tools available and leave the decision on how to generate content, choose its source, and integrate it to the forum owners alone, as they alone are responsible for those decisions—not the forum developers.

How much are you prepared to pay for that? Keep in mind that we are not pulling in billions of dollars in ad revenue so any development costs have to be evaluated carefully. Should we add some AI assistant tools in 5.0.1, or revamp how clubs work making them more useful to micro communities? Neither answer is wrong, but simply saying "AI exists and you should integrate it ASAP" does not mean the execution is as simple.

Also keep in mind that any AI API costs to use, so we'd need to pay for each request or you'd need to pay a subscription to an AI engine such as ChatGPT.

Even still, Apple with its significant R&D reserves only managed to add a fairly lacklustre "Apple Intelligence" layer over the top of its first party apps that does little more than summarise long emails and uses ChatGPT-like proof reading and rewriting tools.

[Charles]

1 hour ago, KT Walrus said:

I hate that so many search results these days point to AI generated content. The pages on the internet should all be human generated unless the domain uses the .ai TLD. 

Please don’t be tempted to integrate AI content into Invision Community. 

As a user, I want to read human generated content on the web. If I want an approximate answer, I will use an AI agent.

Nothing would be worse than visiting a forum and later finding out that it is simply a bunch of AI agents discussing amongst themselves. What a waste of time reading content like this. 

I agree with all that.

I do think that AI has a place to learn and help humans discover good content. Like AI might notice people searching for a specific term and then auto-feature that content or make other assumptions to “magically” get you to great insights by people.

Another thing I think AI could be great at is curation. I don’t mean summaries. I think we’re all already sick of AI generated summaries. But imagine instead a topic with 100 replied. When the topic was new, those 100 replies were a great conversation discussing a solution. Now you read that topic 6 months later and you just want to get to the point. Sure, AI could generate a vague summary but what I would find more interesting is if it picked out the core most important human posts where I could get the point of the discussion while also reading the nuance of interactions that got people to said point. To me, that is an exciting use of AI. 

[hameedacpa]

Thank you all for the constructive discussion. Everything I wanted to point out has already been included in my previous posts. I believe that the open-source forum software Discourse has set forth effective standards for AI. I hope all the forums that played a role in establishing the concept of online forums in the past will follow Discourse example by studying the new AI capabilities developed
https://www.discourse.org/ai
Respect to you all.

[RevengeFNF]

@hameedacpa when i enter a forum, i want to talk with other human beings. If i want to talk with AI i will simple open ChatGPT and talk to it.