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Would AI be useful on the element14 Community?

Alanta Lee

We’re exploring whether AI could be useful on the element14 Community, and we’d love to hear what members think.

This is early thinking. We’re not looking at using AI to replace the Community, replace member generated content, or take away from the conversations that happen here. The value of the Community comes from real people sharing real experience, projects, reviews, questions and advice.

Instead, we’re interested in whether AI could support members in practical ways, particularly around finding, improving or understanding existing content.

For example, AI could potentially help with things like:

  • Finding relevant forum posts, projects, RoadTests, documentation or product information
  • Suggesting clearer titles for forum posts, blogs or projects so they are easier for others to find
  • Helping members structure a RoadTest Review and make sure they have covered the key points
  • Translating Community content
  • Suggesting related content, resources or next steps
  • Helping newer members ask clearer questions
  • Explaining technical concepts or terminology
  • Highlighting useful answers or discussions from across the Community

I’ll be honest, I’m not completely sold on AI being added everywhere just for the sake of it. A lot of companies seem to be putting AI into every platform and product at the moment, and sometimes it’s genuinely useful, but other times it can feel a bit unnecessary or forced. That’s why I’m really interested to hear what people here think. If AI was ever used on the element14 Community, I’d want it to actually help members with real things, not get in the way of the conversations, projects and advice that make the Community valuable in the first place, and not necessarily be used to generate new content outright.

A few questions to kick off:

  • Where do you think AI could genuinely help on the Community?
  • What tasks or moments feel frustrating today that AI might improve?
  • Are there any AI features you would actively avoid or distrust?
  • Would you use AI to help find answers from existing discussions, projects or documentation?
  • Are there any examples from other sites or tools where AI has worked well, or badly, for you?

  • There are places AI could thrive, and make site management simpler for humans without replacing organic dialog. 
    thats the implicit expectation of AI systems. 

    where I think intuitive data driven analytical could be most helpful:

    polling:
    quantifying user satisfaction
    deployment. 

    theres a lot of good here, and I spend a stupid amount of time looking for it. 


    I asked AI how to do some plc thing the other day, and ai told me to get in contact with myself, at element14

    for you, that means results are searchable. 

  • I've found AI a useful as a research assistant. If I can narrow the search focus it culls material for me to review. Does save on the time of putting these old eyes to every page. I've occassionaly, when frustrated looking for content here, it would be nice for AI to run the labyrinth and can just wait for it to find the path. 

  • AI can help us better structure our writings and the overall structure of the projects. That would make it more intuitive. That direction would be nice.

  • AI for me helps for translation and as an accessibility feature, doing spell checking, fixing grammar, translating other content if necessary.

    I don't really find it useful for searching for content, depending on the model used and how it's looked at the content, it can sometimes get the wrong intention or idea, but then no search is perfect.

    What would probably be nice is if I've worked on a project, and I've spoken my notes or thoughts into an audio recording, and then I can upload that with my text notes and say "write a draft blog post from this for me", because sometimes I'm tired, sometimes I'm fatigued, other times I want to tell someone about it but I've spent my 9 till 5 working already, and now I've spent a couple of hours per day working on a project and I want to share it, and I can tell people about it, but the mental capacity to think "ah I need this in it.." is sometimes a step too far.

    Then there's adding citations, maybe linking to where to buy bits of it, etc. Or maybe I have notes scribbled down by hand, I'm very much a 'note taker' but making that cohesive? That's a bit of effort.

    So how would AI help me? I want it to make promoting myself and what I do easier with what I've put together already to match how others want to digest it. From my phone, laptop or tablet.

    Lower that barrier to entry a bit and let me tweak it myself afterwords. Damn em-dashes.

    And maybe I want it to suggest people that have made something similar to what I've worked on, so I can connect with them and ask questions, because it's a little difficult to find another person on this Community at present.

  • Smart-Ass-istant.......I can see that.....

  • in reply to SensoredHacker0

    proove you are human: well I have this poorly constructed blog...

  • You should only use AI if you completely verify and validate the answers it gives.

    When you take away the humans, you lose the entire concept of community.

  • in reply to dougw

    Agree. Even as a "search engine" it could be detrimental. If someone is having an issue or wants to discuss a topic that has been discussed before, I would rather have them "accidentally" make a "duplicate" post (assuming they couldn't find the information with the regular search) than having an AI agent hallucinate a response for them or having them waste time browsing through "relevant" posts potentially identified by an AI.

    Worst case they will be redirected to the previous existing discussion. But it could also happen that new eyes will see the topic and maybe will chime in with a different perspective, a better solution, or new approaches/tools that didn't exist when the original discussion happened.

    So I don't think an AI-powered search has a place in a community-driven platform.