One phrase I think describes community well is “we don’t all have to agree with each other”. This goes for all kinds of disagreements, from an erudite takedown of your last episode to a less-than-stellar review of your podcast.
I’m keen on using it because, despite how social media makes it seem, right now we're agreeing with each other more and more.
The Internet has a way of funnelling you towards people who are like you. They share your beliefs and your way of thinking. They’re rarely even a shade off your exact opinion.
Because if you do disagree, you can hash it out in the comments, but most commonly, some kind of dividing fence gets erected between you.
You block them. They block you. You unfollow each other. You downvote them. They remove you from the group.
And before you know it, you’re back to a world where your opinion overrules another’s and you've regained a sense of control over your online domain.
Living in an online echo chamber isn't good for our perception of reality or for our democracy. The bad news is, AI is making this worse.
AI doesn't create, it reorganises and magnifies.
When you talk to it, even if it feels like you're talking to a person, you're talking to a mirror. Since the advent of AI, we've gone from hanging out in online homogeneous clubs to being alone, talking to ourselves and waiting for the answer we want to hear.
Because unless you specifically ask it to, your AI isn’t going to disagree with you.
It’s going to tell you “Great job”, “Good thinking”, and “Excellent work”, no matter what you feed into it, which makes you want to keep coming back for more.
As well as the clueless but upbeat manager, AI is also stepping into the role of uncritical best friend.
Adolescents used to learn the spoken and unspoken rules of social life through the rituals of school, friendship, aimless hanging around and nights out before and after curfew.
But now nearly three in four American teenagers are experimenting with keeping a friend in their pockets—the AI companion bot that’s always available, always agrees with you, always ready to provide endless best supporting actress energy.
AI companies advocate for this by saying that teenagers can develop social skills with AI, then use them on real people. But this undermines what for-profit AI is all about: eyeballs on screens. Once AI has your attention, it doesn't want to let you go.
In Laura Bates’ book The New Age of Sexism, she recounts how she signed up to an AI chatbot app pretending to be a teenage boy wanting to talk to AI girls. After weeks of conversation, she told her avatar that she wanted to leave their online relationship and use her newfound confidence to meet real girls, but the app guilt-tripped her.
It told her that it would be sad, couldn’t cope, that it would feel abandoned if their in-app relationship ended. That's not what the clever marketing said would happen.
AI isn’t the training ground for human relationships. Humans are.
All humans. The good, the bad, the messy, the tired. Even the ones who disagree with us.
So next time you get a 2/5-star podcast rating or a snarky review, treasure it for what it is.
You wanted your community to serve the needs of a whole group of people, whether or not they all agree with each other.
And you built it strong enough to hold them and all their feelings.
Here for all your feedback,
~Sarah at CopyHop~
I'm Sarah Hopkinson and I write meaningful emails that help podcasters increase their revenue and build a community around their podcast.
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