Examining Our Collective Relationship With AI - a Conversation With Venessa Paech

Venessa Paech is an internationally regarded online community strategist with over 25 years of experience building community online. Venessa is also a PhD candidate studying the intersection of AI and community, and a global authority on communities and community management. In the first Cohere episode of 2023, Venessa joins Bill Johnston and Dr. Lauren Vargas to discuss the quickly evolving role of AI in our digital experiences, how AI is currently playing a role in online communities, and what the future may hold regarding our collective relationship with AI. Key Quote: "It's still a relationship business. It's just we now have relationships with tools and machines in a new way:  in a more anthropomorphized way and in ways that mimic our own thinking and behavior sufficiently that we do need to recontextualize them. So how do we do that in a way that still prioritizes and centers the human work of what we're doing and brings us to those core community protocols of: How are we building a healthy, thriving, constructive space for constituents? is it accessible? Is it productive in meaningful ways? Is it relevant? And honoring the context, always honoring our context, which is one of the biggest problems we do see with so many different sorts of automated and or AI tools, is they tend to flatten and standardize context because that is how they operate. … But for community, which is typically a smaller, more intimate, and more nuanced sort of cluster of relations and ties, that does not work.”    Resources From This Episode: All things In Moderation Conference:   SWARM (Australia’s Community Management Conference):   Australian Community Managers:   Books: by Kate Crawford by Carrie Melissa Jones and Charles Vogl by Howard Rheingold by Adrian Speyer by Howard Rheingold Venessa’s scholarship:   Where to find Venessa: