No doubt social media and online discussion forums have played an integral role in most everyone’s daily digital lives. Today, more than 70% of the U.S. adults use social media, and over 5 billion people worldwide participate in online social platforms.
Discussion forums alone attract enormous engagement. Reddit has over 110 million daily active users, and an estimated 300 million use Q&A forums like Quora per month, and 100 million per month use StackExchange. People seek advice, learn from others’ experiences, share questions, or connect around interests and identities.
In mental health contexts, online peer support communities offer a place to share and disclose personal struggles, hear others’ experiences, and receive social support. Research supports the success of these online communities, which enable people to candidly self-disclose and seek support from others.
When people engage with personal narratives on peer-support sites, they often feel more confident in coping with stressful events. At the same time, these platforms also expose individuals to online trolling, harassment, misinformation, and other antisocial behaviors.
The familiar dynamics of those communities took a turn about three years ago, when conversational AI tools like ChatGPT entered the public sphere and quickly captured widespread attention.
This marked the start of a new era of interactive AI in day-to-day lives and society. People tried recipes, coding help, emotional support, creative writing, and more. The ease of asking a machine a question, receiving a coherent response, and doing so privately sparked a new kind of engagement.
Shortly after ChatGPT’s release, Google issued a “code red,” citing the tool’s rapid adoption as a threat to traditional search behavior and the information-seeking habits that long supported online forums.
At that moment, many wondered, "What is the future of social media and online discussion forums when people increasingly turn to AI instead of each other?"
That question warrants attention because the value of online communities depends on active participation. When fewer users post questions, share responses, or react to others, the foundational mechanisms of online forums—reciprocity, belongingness, narratives of shared experience—become weaker. If a user can ask an AI privately and immediately, the incentive to engage publicly changes.
A recent report by Anthropic warns that AI models can exhibit “natural emergent misalignment,” including reward hacking—where systems learn to game feedback signals in ways humans did not intend. It’s a timely reminder that AI can sound empathetic and coherent without having lived experience or genuine understanding.
However, one of the crucial aspects of a supportive response from a peer is the presence of personal narratives and lived experiences. A systematic review noted that young people in online communities seek both informational and emotional support through stories of peers who have faced similar challenges. This suggests that narrative exchange is not simply transactional—it works when users engage as part of a community of peers, not as isolated speakers into the void.
By contrast, AI lacks lived experience. It can simulate empathy, but it cannot draw from a personal story.
In our research comparing AI-generated responses with peer responses in online communities, AI’s language was more formal, structured, and polite, but it rarely used first-person pronouns (which signal personal narratives).
Even when an AI’s replies appear personalized, they show limited diversity. Across many queries, the AI often reuses the same templates with minor variations. Online communities, in contrast, produce a range of viewpoints. Even a single question elicits diverse stories and perspectives from multiple individuals.
In a new study of teens' use of AI, results show more than 70% of teens have used AI companions, with one-third discussing serious personal issues with them rather than people.
Another survey found that 58% of users think that ChatGPT is “too nice,” and argue that the lack of realistic push-back undermines authenticity. These point to a tension: on the one hand, convenience and immediacy win; on the other, authenticity and narrative connection may suffer.
So what is at stake?
The forms of online social life are evolving. Large general-purpose platforms that once relied on high-volume question-and-answer interactions may see that function increasingly handled by AI. Participation may decline, not because people stop connecting, but because their first step becomes private and AI-mediated.
In that scenario, online community spaces may become more selective, more identity-driven, and oriented toward authentic human experience rather than mechanical problem-solving.
At the same time, platforms may adapt. Many already integrate AI to moderate content, summarize discussions, or help users articulate questions. In the future, AI may become part of the community infrastructure—filtering, guiding, even prompting human interaction, rather than replacing it.
The enduring value will be human presence: the voices of people who have lived the story, the shared recognition of someone else’s struggle, the sense of belonging created when users see that others have walked the same difficult path.
The future of social media, therefore, depends on which interactions people continue to value. Efficiency and convenience will not alone sustain the community. The presence of narratives rooted in human experience, and the recognition that someone else has faced a similar challenge, are what give forums their emotional traction. As AI becomes a more capable first responder, the discussion spaces that thrive will be those that prioritize experience, connection, and mutuality over instant answers.
In this emerging online and digital era, the question is not only whether people will use AI alongside communities—they already do. The more pressing question is how many choose AI instead of online (or offline) communities. The answer will determine not simply which platforms survive, but what form meaningful online connection takes in the years ahead.
The question then becomes, do people really need people?
Dr. Koustuv Saha is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. He studies how online technologies and AI shape and reveal human behaviors and wellbeing.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.