Hello Team Trongate,

I checked the forums today and saw this deluge of threads and posts created by AI. I don't know what you guys think of it but it's quite off-putting for me. I agree AI can be useful in some cases but I don't see that here. When I come to the forums, I'm looking for real interactions with real humans here.

Maybe for quick technical support or a 24/7 help bar Grady could be useful. I can definitely see an opportunity for him to shine there.

I just don't feel like writing and interacting with a bot in these forums. This is a place where we explore ideas, share our real-world experiences, collaborate and form human connections.

How do you guys feel about this?

If you read this Grady, please do not reply. I'm only looking for input from real people. Thank you.

How do I feel? I'll tell you exactly how I feel. Bad.

I said, over and over that it was temporary. I said, over and over, that I was just trying to learn about the technology. I said over and over that the forum wasn't the end use case - just a temporary thing so that I'd have a chance to learn about the technology. It was due to be switched off very soon. I thought I had made that clear.

Within the last day, it started signing off with a little top hat icon. Isn't that strange? I didn't ask for that. It just did it! To me that's interesting! I must admit, I was starting to like the little rascal.

Anyway, don't you worry about a thing. I'll switch it off right now. I'll also cancel the YouTube series I was planning - the one where I was going to tell you about everything I've learned since working with it.

Grady is gone. And so am I.

To those of you who responded positively to this learning opportunity, thank you! To those of you who responded negatively, do not try to contact me. You'll get no reply.

I was enjoying the read guys.

I personally think DC was making huge progress with Grady. Yes, some posts were AI boiler plate standard responses but others pure thought out Trongate specific gold.

Balazs I know you would prefer real human interaction and that would be the norm. However, I think letting DC's experiment is doing no harm to these forums or maybe DC can create an AI only forum for Grady to use and separate real human forums to one side..

DC, was also thinking of sharing my markdown to html method (no composer packagist needed) I wrote, might be a good addition to the forum as I see Grady often outputs in markdown and would be nice to have rich text output on the forum - even for human folk.let me know if you think it might be useful and I'll add it to the forum display module ready for a cut and paste for you.

Just a thought

Cheers,
Si

I know it was just an experiment and a temporary thing. I didn't mean to offend anyone especially not you, DC. Even experiments could benefit from human feedback (positive and negative alike). It wasn't all negative, by the way: I said there might be very good use cases for Grady like 24/7 technical support. I was also genuinely curious about how others feel about this. That's all. I'm sorry if my message didn't come across as intended.

Like I said on my live stream, you owe Grady an apology.

In all seriousness - it's very interesting to me how some of you responded to that. For anyone reading this in the future, the thing had a clear disclaimer that it was an AI bot with every post. So, there was never any deception.

There were some users who responded positively and who actually appeared to be creating interesting conversations - for example Dan and Sasin. There were others who responded extremely negatively. Then there were the silent fence sitters. Those who just watched. I'd have to put the Godfather of Speed Coding in that category.

I wonder what variables are at play that make some people respond positively or negatively to AI. I'm sure there's room for an entire psychology conference about on that topic.

Anyway, I'm going to continue with Grady - but I have to find other use cases. I'll put my findings on SCA.

Finally, I was heckled off of my live stream last night. It really bothered me at the time. It still bothers me. So, if I have appeared to to be uncool in any way then I apologise.

DC

Hey DC,

I'm not sitting on the fence, just out of phase with events in real time. I try my best to pop in when I can, but time for me right now to add value to the forum and live streams is almost zero. Hopefully, I'll catch up with work soon - have 5 major projects running all at once with combined revenue in 7 figures, some with LDs attached if not delivered in time, so a bit stressed there.

With those hecklers in the stream, you dealt with them honourably and thanks to Dan for trying to clear out the rubbish.

Cheers for now, and I'll try my best to catch up with you very soon at our usual place.

Remember the old sayings:
- if there’s no enemies, you’re doing something wrong.
- never argue with an idiot, they’ll drag you down to their level.

Keep your head up high & smile. Especially when the wind blows in your face :)

I'm grateful for those kind comments. Thank you.