Analyzing the Impact of ChatGPT on Online Communities

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, is gaining traction. We’re sure you’ve heard the panic in the voices of people who are afraid that ChatGPT could replace community professionals. However, this is not entirely true as you can use it to support and enhance your community.

We believe that tools like ChatGPT are incredibly powerful, especially for community and marketing professionals.

It takes a lot of time and effort to manage, run, and develop online communities for increased user engagement. And ChatGPT could be just the right tool to ensure a smooth community management process.

Let’s decipher the 101 of ChatGPT in communities and understand how this super tool can enable community managers to streamline processes and foster human-to-human connections.

ChatGPT: Understanding the ‘What’

ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. The AI allows users to create a free profile and have conversations with it about any topic.

It interacts in a conversational manner. A dialogue format allows ChatGPT to respond to follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

It understands human speech and produces easy-to-read writing. The question-answer format used in ChatGPT makes it interesting.

ChatGPT has a wide range of potential uses, including community chatbots, assistants, and other applications requiring high-level natural language processing.

A business could, for instance, use ChatGPT to develop community guidelines as it might come up with ideas you hadn’t considered. Also, you could empower your super users to create an assistant that answers their questions and executes their commands using chatbots.

Using ChatGPT: Decoding the Right Way

ChatGPT can be accessed in multiple ways. Let’s take a look at a few.

1. Fostering Lifelike Introductions: With the help of ChatGPT, David Spinks, a community professional, created some posts that welcomed new members to the community and encouraged them to introduce themselves. With ChatGPT’s alarmingly lifelike conversation modeling, community managers can create team-standard responses for welcoming new members that don’t feel canned.

2. Boosting Community Engagement: ChatGPT can be used to communicate with users in real time and answer their questions. This will not only improve user experience but also boost community engagement. Moreover, ChatGPT can also be used to facilitate virtual events and activities, bringing members together and fostering a sense of community. AI-powered gamification can also be a useful tool for increasing engagement in online communities, but its success will depend on the specific implementation and the role of human moderators and community managers in supporting the experience.

3. Curating Community Content: Content creators and conversation facilitators are often roles that community professionals play. The heavy lifting can be done by ChatGPT, which can aid in creating fresh content topics and conversation starters. In situations where a community manager isn’t deeply knowledgeable about the topic of the community they manage, this is particularly useful. ChatGPT helps in creating a fully searchable (via chat) database of your community’s content.

4. Providing Education and Resources to Your Community: The development of educational content and resources for members of industry-specific communities can be a great way to provide value to them. By synthesizing content from across the internet, ChatGPT can generate conversationally formatted educational content. Before posting such content, make sure you fact-check it, as ChatGPT’s current AI models only cover up to 2021.

5. Planning Community Events, Contests, and Activities: Community and events go hand-in-hand. Developing a list of potential community events to pitch to your community members can be helpful when deciding what events, contests, or activities to organize. You can integrate ChatGPT into virtual events within online communities, offering support and information to attendees in real-time, improving the overall experience for participants.

6. AI-powered Management and Moderation: ChatGPT can be used to moderate and manage online communities, helping to ensure that they remain safe and productive for all members. ChatGPT can be integrated into online communities to provide AI-powered moderation, helping to ensure that all content is appropriate and in line with community guidelines. It can be used to assist online community moderators by automating repetitive tasks such as flagging inappropriate content, generating reports, and facilitating moderation workflows.

7. ChatGPT-powered Community Analytics: ChatGPT can be used to analyze data from online communities, providing insights into community sentiment, popular topics, and member behavior. This will support decision-making, ensuring that decisions are made based on accurate, up-to-date information.

8. Multilingual Support: ChatGPT is a language processing tool, and it can be configured to support multiple languages in your branded communities. It is an ideal solution for your businesses if you have a global presence. ChatGPT is known to enable communication and collaboration between members from different linguistic backgrounds.

9. Increases Accessibility And Customer Support: ChatGPT can be used to provide instant support to customers and users of online communities, improving response times, and resolving issues more efficiently. But how? Its automotive nature makes it easier to find the relevant piece of content from the community’s knowledge base to share with a member who asks a similar question.

Is ChatGPT Taking Communities by Storm?

Is ChatGPT a threat to online communities? The answer is yes. Because it could lead to two things really fast. Firstly, there can be a huge decline in search traffic as people may start going to ChatGPT first. Secondly, a possible decline in engagement can be witnessed if people get answers without having to ask questions.

There’s also a lot of fear about AI tools replacing the jobs of humans. But Richard Millington, a community professional, says that ChatGPT has its own set of limitations. It’s unable to comprehend everything and makes predictions. Moreover, ChatGPT simply attempts to give the most “plausible” answer.

He suspects that ChatGPT is going to have a big impact. It’s not something we can dismiss, but it’s not going to be the ‘future of community’ either. In the real world, ChatGPT helps members find information that is already available. Big win there.

Community professionals are certain that ChatGPT and AI cannot replace the power of human community professionals, it can only enhance it.

If thoughtfully implemented, ChatGPT can do a lot to assist your community team in –

• Curating Impactful Content: If it takes three hours to write a blog post; AI cuts that time in half.
• Ensuring Personalization: With the help of AI algorithms, personalized programs can be created based on information about each member, including their goals, preferences, and demographics. The AI algorithm can provide incentives and encouragement to members who are less engaged.
• Introducing AI-powered Gamification: Online communities can benefit from AI-powered gamification, but its effectiveness depends on the specific implementation and the role of human moderators and community managers.
• Engaging Members in a Variety of Ways: Using ChatGPT can help you increase human-to-human contact within your community. Time spent on tasks that bottleneck the running of a community can and should be invested in human-to-human interaction time. That’s an irreplaceable human skill that will enable your community to flourish.

ChatGPT essentially lowers the cost of delivering support to customers in the form of questions and answers. But answers aren’t what’s scarce anymore. Helping members ask the right question and verifying the answers is the new challenge.

It is being said that we’ll have only fully AI-managed communities in the future. But we sincerely doubt that. This is because we think that in the years to come AI will be used by humans to create scalable communities. AI won’t replace us, it will simply enhance us.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) can support and automate tasks, but it cannot replace human interaction and empathy. An effective online community combines the power of artificial intelligence with the expertise of experienced community managers.

We love playing with ChatGPT, and it’s fascinating to explore using Al not as a silver bullet to replace humans on the internet but as a tool to augment and assist humans. After spending weeks with ChatGPT, we are convinced this tool can save you hours of work. However, ChatGPT is simply a tool that will provide answers, but you need to know the right questions to ask.

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