Are AI models like ChatGPT the future of community building?

It’s been a couple of days since OpenAI released its latest product ChatGPT and broke the internet. Since then, my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds only consisted of screenshots from answers of the new model. I think it is safe to say that ChatGPT marks a new melting point in the broader adoption of artificial intelligence. “Sometime in the future” is suddenly now.

As a company creating a product for community-led growth, we ask ourselves, how can AI change the way we build communities? Will models like ChatGPT replace the tasks of community managers?! And how authentic and relevant can online communities be when you're no longer sure if you're talking to a human or a machine?

I played around with ChatGPT to test how well it could perform with various community building tasks.

Community definition

To get started with our new community, we want ChatGPT to create a step-by-step guide on how to create an online community.

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Now, let’s see if ChatGPT could help to conduct some of those steps, for example, the creation of a community mission statement.

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Not too bad. Now we want to use the mission statement to add a code of conduct to our community.

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Community outreach & onboarding

After we defined the community and created a code of conduct, we want to reach out to some people and find the first members.

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This could actually work. Especially if you personalize it to the people you want to reach out. I added my Twitter profile and it seems like ChatGPT crawls some data from my profile.

Let’s assume that some people agree to join our freshly created community on a Discord server. We want to send them a nice and warm welcome message.

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Community engagement & management

Our community is now up and running and obviously it’s a lot work to spark engagement and manage all things going on. First of all, we ChatGPT to create a message that triggers some engagement.

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Another point where community managers have to jump in are violations of the code of conduct. How would this be handled?

And last but not least we want to have message that we can send members to get feedback on their community experience.

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Wrapping up

The answers from ChatGPT really blew my mind. It is very impressive how good the texts are, especially when you consider that I always took the first answer. The model unfolds even more power as soon as you really communicate with it in a back and forth and give feedback on the answers.

I am convinced that ChatGPT and other AI models will completely change the way we work in the coming months. Texts that would have taken hours before can now be created in a matter of seconds. This will drastically improve the productivity of knowledge workers.

Does this mean that there will soon be less community managers? I don’t think so. Rather, it will be possible to fully automate repetitive tasks (such as outreach), freeing up more time for things that humans are still better at than AI: building relationships with other humans (but perhaps with the support of a AI).