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Hello GMF members,

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What I'm about to lay out in this post may be a pipedream and may be completely infeasible, but here goes!

With a great team of fellow moderators, I'm the longtime chief mod of the free and non-profit Nordhavn Owners Group (NOG), which been online for just over 20 years, has about 950 users, and contains about 60,000 posts. As the name suggests, the group exists for owners of Nordhavn brand yachts (almost entirely motor yachts), vessels designed and built for offshore ocean passages, including ocean crossings.? Roughly 90-95% of the world's Nordhavn owners are members, and many of us have crossed oceans in our boats. NOG is a very focused group and, aside from the camaraderie it generates, it plays an important role in the lives of many Nordhavn owners by providing quick and reliable answers to technical questions about their boats and the sophisticated equipment and machinery onboard.

I've been personally experimenting with artificial intelligence of late, mainly ChatGPT and Google Bard, and that's gotten me wondering if there's a way to suck up the whole NOG database of posts, then use that as the basis for generating/posting quick AI answers to questions posted by members.

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While the information that appears on NOG is not proprietary, our members have come to rely on the members-only privacy of the group, so it's essential to have the information I'm talking about controlled--that is, available only to members of the group.

My own very limited experimentation with AI tells me that what I'm thinking is do-able, but how to set it up, which AI services to use, and how to limit distribution of the information to group members suggests that this won't be quick and easy.?

At the same time, it also occurs to me that a feature like this might just be a great addition to much more than my own little corner of Groups.io, and I would be surprised if Mark Fletcher and his Grouops.io team have not already begun to look into something similar which could be offered as a "premium" feature for Groups.io groups.? If Groups.io were to get involved, that could make the whole deal available to more groups and members and ease Groups.io members into using AI.

My initial research suggests that one way to start is to use an AI Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT, and:

1. Preprocess the data: ?Cleaning the data, removing any noise or irrelevant information, and making sure that the data is in a format that the LLM can understand.
2. Train the LLM: Feeding the preprocessed data into the LLM and allowing it to learn the patterns and relationships in the data.
3. Use the LLM to answer questions: This will involve feeding the LLM questions about the data and getting answers back.

Obviously, there’s a lot of work to be done to move forward with this, but I’m thinking that this idea has the potential to lead to a much-enhanced user experience not only for NOG but for many Groups.io groups.

So, does something like this make sense, or am I crazy for even thinking about it?

And is what I've outlined here likely something Groups.io will take an interest in?

Any ideas, thoughts, or wisdom on this you might have will be most welcome.?

If you believe that what I’m proposing makes no sense at all, please tell me why.

Many thanks,

Milt Baker
Chief moderator
Nordhavn Owners Group

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Hello Milt and all

That makes perfect sense technically, but not on the economic/social side.

It costs a lot of money to clean data for an Large Language Model, and then to train it.

Companies do it as they will then save on employment costs, replacing entire call centers who answer customer questions with AI to some extent. But these companies get thousands of calls per day asking for assistance.

On the forums however, even the most active like this group get around 300 questions per month if you look at the stats, which is around 10 questions per day. And those who answer the questions are volunteers anyway.

And then there is also the "camaraderie" side as subscribers in groups get to know each other and some probably form friendships like in your group

So do you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to answer a few questions per day with AI, make NO savings on staff to offset this, and make your group impersonal at the same time? That's what I'd be asking myself if I was you.

Regards

On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 12:17 AM, Milt Baker wrote:

Mark Fletcher and his Grouops.io team

Apart from Nina, who I understand is contracted to maintain the manuals in the Help Centre, the Groups.io team numbers 1 - and that is Mark Fletcher.

Regards
Andy

Many thanks for your thoughtful, eye-opening response, Safe-Tex!

I don't personally have the time or AI skills to preprocess the data, train the AI Large Language Model (LLM), or put the LLM to work answering questions.

So it seems clear that my idea of trying to use AI to help improve my group would lead me down a bad rabbit hole.? And that as a non-profit, shoestring, volunteer operation, my group would be almost certain to lose much more than it could gain by trying to use AI.

My thanks for shooting my idea down and doing so with wisdom and grace.? And for no doubt saving me untold frustration and headaches!

Milt Baker
Nordhavn Owners Group

I understand that there are services that create LLMs and generative AI engines based on company email and other documents for businesses. I haven't looked into the pricing and I haven't heard how successful they have been at dealing with the great bugaboo of generative AI: hallucinations, the generation of false scenarios and data. Until the hallucination problem is solved definitively, I'd be cautious at investing in such a service, although turning a groups.io repository into an LLM would probably be a piece of cake project for such a service.
Best, Marv

On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 06:17 PM, Milt Baker wrote:

My initial research suggests that one way to start is to use an AI Large Language Model (LLM) such as ChatGPT

I know that Mark uses ChatGPT personally because he mentioned it in .? Just not sure if he'd be interested in integrating it into the site.

Duane
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Lots of detailed information can be found in the Owners Manual and Members Manual.

Hi all,

Re trying to use artificial intelligence, to mess about with posts that experienced members have written.......

My not so humble opinion, is -- don't!!!!? Utterly utterly don't!

I've moderated a number of groups where you have very experienced people, posting about whatever the topic/subject is, sometimes it's some uncommon medical condition, sometimes it's cat rescue, sometimes it's renaissance music, etc.?

And I have acquaintances from bygone tech college days, who have reported on their AI interactions --

AI makes things up.? And it can then be hard to differentiate, is that something true from an experienced entity?? or does that just sound good, is it just made up?

I think it will be a while before we get access to AI that isn't making things up.

A group with a lot of experienced people in it, is a resource and a treasure!? Good to NOT mess with that!? Gesine?

Hello everyone

Strangely enough, following the recent announcements on OpenAI DevDay, see for example this summary video:

mean pretty much that building an API for a website or forum is going to become much easier than I stated only a week or so ago.
You would still have to clean up all the posts, eliminating old stuff and wrong answers, categorizing questions for different versions of a product or service, as the information on each forum would form the database for the AI chatbot, but if Groups.io could incorporate this feature, then questions could be answered by AI.
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That would mean instant answers but does not rule out that the asker can still post their question.
Whether some groups would want this though is still open to debate bearing in mind that answers are provided free of charge by the community and the social spirit of forums, at least some where there is more consensus that hostility.

Dave Neve

As far as I am concerned if there ever was such a feature it would have to be able to be turned off completely, I cannot conceive a use or need for such a thing personally

Nivard Ovington in Cornwall (UK)

Hear hear!!!

On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 09:24 AM, Nivard Ovington wrote:

As far as I am concerned if there ever was such a feature it would have to be
able to be turned off completely [ snip ]

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I fully agree, Nivard, and furthermore that should be able to be accomplished remotely, too!

Paul M.
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