AI Won't Write Your Stories

Everyone's talking about AI right now.

Every product launch, every startup pitch, every LinkedIn post. "AI-powered this." "Built with AI that." OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta. They're all racing to build the next breakthrough. If you're not shouting about machine learning, you're basically invisible.

I get it. As a software engineer I'm deep in this stuff, and I'm genuinely excited about what AI can do.

But that doesn't mean it belongs everywhere. Especially in a community built on dads being real with each other.

What Makes Pophood Work

The whole point of this platform is authenticity. A dad shares a story about losing his temper with his kid. Another dad responds in The Trenches at midnight because he's been there. Someone uploads a photo of the chaos in their living room because they're not pretending everything's perfect.

That's the magic. Real people sharing real experiences and actually connecting.

The moment you inject AI into that, you break it. An AI-generated response to a struggling dad isn't help, it's noise. And a story written by a language model isn't wisdom. It's just content. Content is everywhere. Wisdom from someone who's actually lived it? That's becoming rare.

So let me be clear about where AI shows up in Pophood and where it doesn't.

Where AI Lives

Two places. That's it.

Content moderation. When someone uploads a photo, AI helps flag anything that shouldn't be here. Same with text. It's a safety layer. A first pass before human eyes review anything that gets flagged. This isn't about policing opinions or sanitizing the community. It's about catching the obvious stuff fast so the platform stays safe for everyone.

The Huddle. This is our curated digest of what's happening in the community. AI helps summarize and surface insights. What themes keep coming up? What questions are dads asking most? It's a tool to help you see patterns you might miss if you're not scrolling through everything every day.

That's it. Two uses. Both in service of the community, not replacing it.

Where AI Doesn't Belong

Stories are written by dads. Questions in The Trenches come from dads asking for help. Responses come from people who've been there, sharing what worked or didn't. Photos are moments from actual lives.

Always.

No AI-generated content. No chatbot responses pretending to be community members. No synthetic wisdom dressed up as lived experience.

This isn't an anti-AI stance. I use AI constantly. It's transformed how I build software. There's a whole other post coming about how AI helped me build Pophood itself. As a tool. As a partner in the process.

But there's a difference between using AI to build something and letting AI become the thing.

Pophood is a community. Communities are made of people. The minute the people become optional, you don't have a community anymore. You have a content farm with better UX.

The Temptation

I'd be lying if I said I haven't thought about it.

At one point I was literally going to add a "Polish with AI" button to the story editor. Let AI clean up your grammar, tighten your sentences, make it sound better.

I scrapped it.

Because the moment you polish someone's raw, 2 AM confession into something that reads like a Medium article, you've lost the thing that made it real. The messy sentences. The rambling. The typos that show someone was typing through exhaustion or tears. That's not a bug. That's the whole point.

And it didn't stop there. AI could generate conversation starters. It could suggest responses when someone's struggling to find words. It could create "sample stories" to show new users what good looks like.

All of that would make the platform feel more alive, faster. It would solve the cold start problem that kills most community products.

But it would also be fake. And fake is the opposite of what we're building.

The whole premise of Pophood is that fatherhood is hard, and pretending it's not makes it harder. That premise falls apart if the platform itself is pretending. If the stories aren't real. If the help isn't human.

So we're doing it the slow way, growing this thing one post at a time.

Why This Matters

Every tool has a purpose. AI is incredible for certain things: speed, scale, pattern recognition, summarization, safety.

But connection? Vulnerability? The feeling that someone actually gets what you're going through?

That's not something you can generate. That's something you earn by showing up, being honest, and trusting that someone else will do the same.

AI can help me build the house. But the people inside? That's on us.