I've been doing community support work for the longest while now and I really enjoy helping others get to the root of their issues and getting them resolved. There is something wonderful about having interactions with other humans trying to explain their issues, even when they don't know exactly what the issue is at times. The essence of going back and forth sharing ideas and learning from each other each step is just something we should not seek to replace.
In recent years AI has become more generally available to everyone and this has led to some better solutions and a new set of issues at the same time.
The Good
The better solutions can be seen in terms of writing code faster than a human can and sometimes even be more secure than that of a human. Also in general everyday management tasks we have seen it excel so much that there are dedicated products like Meta Muse, Grok Bot, Dot and more.
The Not So Good
However on the other side of this there are issues which seem to remove human interaction from the loop. This can be seen in online communities where humans would ask other humans questions and get a human written answer. The social media space is full of these where you now have people replying with AI generated answers to questions they have no experience or expertise in. This has also become rampant in community support, not only are the answers to questions AI generated but now the questions themselves are AI generated and at most time both are just outright wrong. The issue is the one asking the question doesn't have enough domain knowledge to push back against the AI when it suggests what the issue is and instead of taking the time to learn and understand the domain a bit more they jump straight to the community forum to ask exactly what the AI gave to them. And then there's a reply to the question. And the reply is from someone who also used AI to generate an answer. Both parties have no domain knowledge or experience when prompting AI. Hence, they get mostly incorrect answers. Now, if I was using AI, and I was given a question by AI, surely, I too would be able to use AI to answer the question. So why would I need to post it on a forum for someone else to use AI to give me a reply? This is where we are now, since we removed the human out of the loop. We've become more reliant on the machine and stopped using our own brain to think through an issue, research an issue and find answers, but rather we push everything over to AI.
The Better
This doesn't have to be this way because if we're able to still go back and learn in the way we were taught in school, research and understand a problem before asking AI for help with it, then we'll get better results. Also a huge part of us learning is by trying stuff ourselves, whether it be on our own or through interaction with other humans. This is one of the things I miss the most on community help platforms. It's when someone asks a question and then another person replies and the person who asked the question decides to follow up with more information or asking for more clarity in the reply and this goes back and forth until both parties (or sometime multiple parties) get the issue resolved. This is the soul of the community and we shouldn't let this wither away.