Without a place to interact such as Community Spirit, there will be fewer posters who would be here at all, let alone bother helping with replies on eBay issues.
Let’s face it: these boards are not humming and buzzing with a huge crowd. It’s just enough to give helpful information based on personal experience and/or dissecting eBay policies and announcements to help fellow eBayer who could do with a hand.
That leads me to a suspicion that I hope is nonsense. AI-generated board answers.
If that happens, it will be disastrous (in my view). AI content is obvious. It doesn’t work on Facebook groups etc where AI responses stick out like a sore thumb. The eBay chatbot shows how unhelpful and frustrating non-human responses are… AI gets things wrong and can’t properly self-correct.
I can’t express just how annoying I find those stupid AI “answers” on google. I do a great deal of searching online for a wide variety of information or research or sources, and while I can’t stop my eyes from absorbing that summation at the top of the search results, I look at the search result links to get things started with research etc. In that brief glance, I can spot dubious AI hallucinations, and it doesn’t take long before my search proper turns up information contradicting the AI result, or confirming that the answer is highly debated, and so on.
AI will do the same for eBay issues; in fact, it does.
Anyway, I hope that my speculation about the new transformer super-duper eBay Community boards is way off base. Human experience is a growing and valuable asset, and intrinsically I doubt that generative content based on outside-in data-gobbling of a static period or periods of posted experience can substitute adequately for the real thing.
