Is AI replacing Forums ?

The Apple Support Community does not use AI to provide answers to other members. It is a global community supported by dedicated volunteers who take the initiative to help others, drawing on their own knowledge, experience, experimentation, and understanding of Apple products and services.

As far as my own contributions are concerned, I would say that around 95% of my answers come from my own thoughts, knowledge, and personal experience. However, I do use AI as a tool to help me express those thoughts more effectively.

There is also a very practical reason for this. English is not my primary language. Although I can understand and communicate in English, expressing detailed technical thoughts clearly, precisely, and professionally is not always easy for me. I therefore use AI to help me put my thoughts into better English and communicate them more effectively.

I provide AI with my own ideas and a carefully structured, well-balanced prompt, and then ask it to organise my thoughts into a clear, professional, and easy-to-understand response. In other words, AI helps me with the language, presentation, structure, and clarity of my knowledge; it does not replace the knowledge behind the answer.

I believe AI is the future. The sooner we embrace it responsibly and learn how to work with it effectively, the better prepared we will be for what lies ahead. Instead of being afraid of AI, we should learn how to use it intelligently, while continuing to apply our own judgment and common sense.

There is an important distinction to remember: using AI does not mean blindly believing AI. We already do this with many other sources of information in our daily lives.

Consider these four examples:

1. Your smartphone already uses AI

The smartphone in your hand uses AI and machine-learning technologies for many of its core functions, even if you never explicitly enable a feature such as Apple Intelligence. Computational photography, image processing, voice recognition, predictive text, spam detection, personalised suggestions, and many other functions rely on sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.

We have already accepted AI into our everyday lives—often without even thinking about it.

2. Do you believe everything a friend tells you?

When you have a detailed conversation with a friend, do you automatically accept every statement they make as fact?

Probably not.

You may listen carefully, but if something sounds doubtful or important, you may question it, discuss it further, or verify it independently.

That is exactly how we should approach AI.

3. Do you accept everything said in a lecture or seminar?

When you attend a lecture or seminar, do you simply accept everything the professor or speaker tells you without question?

Again, probably not.

You listen, take notes, ask questions, discuss the subject with others, and perhaps refer to books, research papers, or other reliable sources to verify important information.

The fact that the information came from an expert does not eliminate the need for your own judgment.

4. Most importantly—what do you do when you visit a doctor?

Doctors are highly respected professionals, and rightly so. They have spent many years studying medicine and gaining practical experience.

Yet, when faced with a serious or critical medical condition, many people seek a second opinion. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances, they may even seek a third opinion.

Why?

Not because they disrespect the doctor, but because important decisions deserve verification and informed judgment.

The same principle should apply to AI.

AI can be extremely knowledgeable and remarkably useful, but it can also make mistakes. Therefore, we should not blindly accept everything it tells us. We should question it, verify important information, use reliable sources when appropriate, and apply our own experience and common sense.

The real skill in the age of AI is therefore not simply knowing how to ask AI a question. It is knowing what to ask, how to ask it, how to evaluate the answer, and when to verify it.

My experience in the Apple Support Community is a good example. The knowledge, observations, troubleshooting experience, and conclusions are mine. AI helps me turn those thoughts into a more structured, polished, and professional explanation—and, importantly for me, helps me communicate those thoughts in English more effectively.

So, rather than being afraid of AI, we should learn to embrace it with responsibility and grace.

Technology has always changed the way we work. AI is simply the next major step.

The people who learn to work with AI will not necessarily be replaced by AI. They may instead be the people who become more capable because of it.

rony-z wrote:

Is AI replacing Forums ?

I find myself receiving quick, immediate answers and without the feeling of being a snooze, yes, there is a need for some verification of the IA answers, but in general it is a replacement for the forums...

Am I missing something ?

Yes and no.

Focus on those two points - you get quick, immediate answers, and do so without the feeling of being a snooze.

Obviously, AIs respond to prompts promptly. They've been trained on the content of this site, Stack Overflow, and other sites, so they know the top-ranking replies to a given set of keywords.

Also, AIs are more formally LLMs - Large Language Models. That is, they've been trained to respond in human languages and to do so in a fawning, obsequious tone. Let's be honest here, people eat that stuff up.

So yes, AI is replacing the forums.

But technology doesn't just sit in place. Here in the forums, if someone makes a suggestion that would have been appropriate 15 years ago, other people will correct them. But 5 years ago will soon be 15 years ago. Then the AIs will be spitting out obsolete answers. There won't be any more forums to correct them. They will still be as polite and sycophantic as ever, but they won't know about anything that changed after the forums and blogs disappeared.

And after the experience of having all of their content stolen by AI companies, nobody is going to be posting any more content. You'll be on your own at that point.

Apple is not providing AI responses to posts, but occasionally we will see a user that comes along and will just do a copy/paste of a users question into AI, and then post the results here. In the Terms of Use for this site, it states Apple has the right to remove a post that is entirely made up of AI.

Us regular users are pretty quick on providing answers to questions and we take pride in being able to work through a solution with a user that requires a higher level of communication where the AI poster will just dump and run to another post and rarely provide any follow up.

Other users have answers already saved for common questions where they can also post a complete reply rather quickly. Sometimes those go a little sideways as they try and finagle a standard form response to a question that may be slightly different and many times include quite a bit of other information that may not be as relevant to a unique question.

rony-z wrote:

Is AI replacing Forums ?

I find myself receiving quick, immediate answers and without the feeling of being a snooze, yes, there is a need for some verification of the IA answers, but in general it is a replacement for the forums...

Am I missing something ?

Thanks

Presently twenty questions (and replies) in most of an hour, and sixty in two hours, which is a paucity of preguntas for the helpers to ponder, posit, and post.

Welcome and thank you for reaching out. 🤗

All answers should have verifiable links to Apple Support articles or at least be provided by trusted high-ranking members.

Many of us volunteers invest allot of time crafting our content to provide a consistent experience for the end user seeking knowledgeable answers.

We pride ourselves on this expectation by saving and reusing our best content.

If you can kindly provide any specific sources in question, either myself or another trusted high-ranking member can provide some helpful insight for you.

Take care! 👋🏼😉

Smiliñ 😎 Brian | Community Volunteer

For your benefit: this is the prompt I used to generate the post I made earlier here, using an AI. Even the bold font is used by AI, not me.

The Prompt:

Say it better and expand: Apple Support Community does not use AI for providing answers to other members. There are dedicated voluteers across globe who take self intitiative provide answers based on their own experince.

As fas as I am concerned all my 95% of answers are my own thought, knowledfge and experince. However I use AI for converting my thoughts in words by giving AI a well balanced prompt for AI to formulate and layout a professional writeup of my thoughts.

I beleive AI is the future the sooned we embrace it with grace and develop ourselves accordinglt the better.

One need not be afraid of AI, why I say this is explained in the following 4 examples.

1. The mobile in your hand uses AI for many of its core functions apart from allowing a feature called Apple Intelligence to guide you if enabled.
2. When you have detailed conversation or discussion with a friend of yours, do you beleive every word told by your friend. Probably No.
3. When you attend a lecture or seminar do you buy everything that is told to you by the professor. You ask questions and refer to books to ensure you get your inputs right.
   1. This is very important: When you visit a Doctor, do you blindly take their advice or take a second opinion for critical illness. Doctors are highly respectd in the societry but still we seen a second opinion, Sometime even three.

1st Iteation:

Add: My primary language is not English so I use AI to write and communicate better.

No, but volunteers support are pretty quick.