Who’s REALLY Answering Our Questions Here—A Human, an AI, or Just Another Corporate Ghost?

The Apple Support Community is a user-to-user technical forum. Contributors here are all end-users, just like you. Other than the site Moderators, Apple neither monitor nor participate here.

As for some contributors using AI-tools to generate responses that they subsequently post, this is an unfortunate eventuality - over which we genuine contributors, with a desire to help others, have no control. With the rise in availability and general accessibility of AI models, their use is becoming more commonplace - often to the detriment of communities such as ASC.

That said, where senior contributors see obvious AI-generated content that is either grossly incorrect or misleading, we may report it to the site Moderators for assessment. In such cases, a post may be edited or removed entirely at the discretion of a Moderator.

High-level contributors (with a corresponding high-reputation score) have earned their place here; responses from these contributors are very unlikely to be generated using AI-tools.

By contrast, low-level users (with a low reputation score) are perhaps more likely to resort to using AI - in an attempt to make-up for their shortfall in knowledge or in-depth experience with specific Apple products.

Ultimately, material posted here is regulated by the ASC Terms of Use. Amongst other provisions, while not explicitly excluding AI, the ToU states that all posted content should be your own work - and ideally be tested prior to posting to the ASC Community. You'll find a link to the ToU at the bottom of this page.

For your convenience:

Apple Support Communities Use Agreement - Apple Community

Look at the responders' Level. Responders with high rank are all flesh and blood. We've worked together for years and some of us have even attended meet-ups in person or, during COVID, via video-conferencing. Nice folks.

I've been here over 20 years and the only Apple employees I've encountered answering were clearly identified as "community specialists." That participation was short-lived and seems to have ended. I've never seen a moderator respond to a question.

I’ve read threads where replies seem too polished, too fast, too impersonal—like they were whipped up by a machine trained on customer service lingo. No typos. No emotion.

I confess to having a few short boilerplates for simple issues asked here several times a day. Over time I've managed to edit out my famous typos and tighten up the wording, so they get cleaner over time. My day job is as a writer of instructional materials so I apologize if that bleeds over into the communities.

If an Apple employee choses to engage on their own time, we cannot know unless they identify themselves as such.

Yes, I am seeing bot posts here lately. Most will be from a low-level user and are very general—and usually wrong, like advice that only applies to Windows OS.

That's all I can offer now. As other end users we are not privy to any plans or procedures the Mods have to weed out the bots.

Some of that impersonal text comes from years of helping here. Over time, I've learned these two things in particular.

1. Humor - most don't mind, but some then think you're making light of their issue and get angry.
2. Too technical (even when it's necessary) - most don't mind, but some think you're just trying to show smart you are.

You end up developing a writing style that's flat, but not too flat. Technical without trying to sound like Einstein. Overall, your posts sometimes kind of end up reading like an unemotional robot.

There's no writing for one-style-fits-all, but you eventually end up mostly somewhere between technical, but not too technical. That, and text only conversations often leave much to be desired. Sometimes what you wrote is taken in a way you didn't mean at all, but it reads that way to the other person.

Reply to osksildk

I am real . I am level 4 and I'm not likely to use A.I. for answering posts . They may appear polished & perfect because I have good English & grammar skills .

Don't worry about it , keep on asking questions .

🙋‍♀️

Or, just maybe, some of the people here have answered the same **** question so many times...that they started a little library of standard responses that they cut and paste into replies and tweak, instead of writing them from scratch.

Personally, they have my gratitude. I can't even answer another "my 15 year old MacBook Pro running El Capitan won't connect to the Internet using Safari anymore - why is Apple doing this to meeeee???" post. They make me want to slam my face into a desk. If someone has their spiel with a list of alternative browsers (etc) ready to go - I'm more than happy to let them answer.

If I were an AI, I wouldn't feel so frustrated by some of the questions that get posted (but shouldn't have to because 500 variations have already been asked and answered, and those ones aren't unique)...

Apologies, as the Voight-Kampff machine is temporarily unavailable. But I did keep the tortoise on its feet, and my eyes only very dimly show red.

But slightly more seriously, questions involving clearing Activation Lock, or clearing devices “unavailable” or “disabled”, printers, recovering deleted files or photos and those files or photos usually with no backups (nope), re-installing some old version of macOS, printers, downgrading iOS and iPadOS (nope), certificates and the trust store, which anti-malware app or cleaner app or “coffee shop” VPN app is recommended (generally, none), printers, networking not working, assistance with reported hacks, printers, analytics- and telemetry-related concerns, Wi-Fi, cellular carrier Wi-Fi offload profiles, there are myriad routine and familiar questions around here. Did I mention printers? Yeah, those common questions can get answered quickly. Oh, and get a printer with AirPrint.

There are other questions which are much less common. or have become less common over time, such as DNS.

As for the writing style, humor can be misconstrued, and tends not to translate. There are those reading here that will not recognize the context that was referenced above, for instance. More than a few are deeply frustrated, and just want their question answered.

Full disclosure: I have occasionally used the Apple Intelligence summarize function to try to distill some of the more involved questions into something where I can compose a reply within the ASC posting-size character limits, and those summaries are then added to the reply and answered without the use of an LLM.

Yours,

🤖

auraツ wrote:

You're chatting with humans right now.

I don't believe that I am.

Hello~ I can only speak for myself and I can assure you that I in fact am most definitely human. Many of us strive to be as technical as possible for after all this is in fact a technical forum. The agreement that we all agreed to in order to participate here clearly defines participation parameters. Edit… please see *LotusPilot’s* post as it fully addresses your question.

~Katana-San~

I think you're making a fundamental error in your assumptions: smooth and polished = AI. I think you'll find that while AI produces superficially polished prose, it's just that: superficial. It rarely offers more than generalities. The bots that post here also never respond with follow-up posts. Many of us are also of an age where we were taught to value good grammar, proper punctuation, and clear prose. It's a little sad to think that all the hard work our high school English teachers put in to making sure we could write properly means we get mistaken for bots.

Another thing to consider. Lots of people make the "Member Since" field visible in their profiles (click on their names at the top of their posts). You'll see that the very people you seem to think are bots have been members here since before LLM AIs were publicly available. That field is generated by the system, not by us.

My 2 cents.

Everything I post is written by me. It may be informed by other post, and some Google searches (but I verify what I'm reading first).

Some answers I've done so many times, I have an Apple "Text Replacement" that spits out my canned answer. It is sometimes better than what I write on the fly, as I've had a chance to refine my canned answers. But they are manually selected and added to a reply. No Bot, no AI involved.

With respect to AI, I do not intentionally use it, as the company I work for has a strong policy about using AI, and I do not want to accidentally post something to an AI that is work related, and let company information out into the wild.

There is no doubt that some users will simply copy/paste your post into a chatbot and reply. You will find those users are typically Level 1 users with very little points.

I do not want to imply that a Level 1 user does not have anything useful to offer, but it is certainly true that a user who has a higher level and point value has spent considerably more time here and they did not get to that point by posting AI responses. It really requires dedication, thoughtful responses, and follow up conversations with users to gain those points and that is simply not found in any of the AI responses.

You may even see long time contributors call out these posters when any information provided is incorrect or simply unhelpful. The lack of follow up for any information needed by the original poster is also unacceptable and you may see that noted as well. You have many contributors here that will do their best to help, so don't let the few discourage you.

I see what you mean, and I think that some of them could be. But I think the majority of the people on here are humans. I sure hope I am! You'll never know...

IdrisSeabright wrote:

auraツ wrote:

You're chatting with humans right now.

I don't believe that I am.

Hello~ I believe you are correct as usual. Kinda funny if you think about it though ;-)

~Katana-San~

Hello SCA~ Nice to see you as always. Keep on answering questions yourself!!

~Katana-San~

You're chatting with humans right now.