Will AI Degrade Online Communities?

From generating novel recipes to drafting emails to coding, people have found various ways to use generative AI chatbots. Google Labs even helped me put this piece together, providing a short outline that I then began to edit and build out with specifics. But what is at risk by relying on generative AI is not only the many problems inherent in the technology – including bias, hallucinations, potential for spreading disinformation, and lack of transparency about how the models are trained and how they work – but also how it may affect online collaboration, shrinking and even drying out some of the robust communities that have been built over the past thirty years online.