Interesting AI in community example

saramaloney · 2024-10-03T15:08:18+00:00

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Some of you may know because I've posted before, but my company's online community is for family caregivers.

Yesterday, I signed up for a new family caregiver online community called The Sandwich Club ("sandwich generation" refers to caregivers who are taking care of both a parent and a child). I'm not sure what community software they're using.

You can sign up here if you want to join it: https://thesandwichclub.com/

It's still in their beta/launch phase, so not much content yet.

It's interesting how they are promoting AI as a huge part of their community — curious to see if this will engage people more or less.

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Kirstie Macfarlane

Thanks for sharing this @saramaloney , that's very interesting.

I would love to hear more about your experience now that you've had a few weeks to participate. As we're looking at adding our own AI suggested answers tool shortly, I'm curious how people react to that messaging as well (especially in this context rather than a B2B situation).

saramaloney

I would say that their community doesn't feel very authentic or like a community — it feels much more like an AI content generation tool like ChatGPT.

One thing I strongly dislike is that when you go to post a question, it generalizes it. For example, I wrote a question about how we can get my grandfather to eat more because he has dementia and doesn't cook. My question was generalized to, "How Can We Ensure Nutritious Meals for a Loved One with Undiagnosed Dementia?" and stripped the context I gave it.

It's tough to say how people are reacting because they appear to still be in beta, and beta testers are required to comment on posts.

Their bot provides good info, but it doesn't really encourage peer-to-peer discussion in my opinion. It's more of a Q&A tool.

Kirstie Macfarlane

Thanks for the update @saramaloney - it's an interesting choice to overwrite your post entirely like that…

I agree with you that when used improperly the AI bot can really take away from the personal connections that we want to encourage in our communities. There are definitely many circumstances where it can be a very helpful tool, but as you've noted it can also take away from the community in certain cases.

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