AI Helped Build This Site

Most articles on this site were drafted with AI. The design, the book summaries, the exercise guides, the chatbot you may have already used -- much of it was created with AI tools, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. A human directed every decision, reviewed every page, and edited what needed editing.

You deserve to know that. And it's worth explaining why.

Why I'm building this site

For years I have heard people say that a forum needs to "go deeper," and I never fully understood what that meant. A long conversation with AI finally let me map it out in a way that made sense to me. The same goes for the roots of the practice. I like tracing ideas back to where they came from, and the line running from the Quakers to today's peer groups is one I would not have chased down on my own -- it's here now, in How Peer Groups Evolved and The Clearness Committee. Building the flip cards, where a summary turns over into a conversation with Sage, was the same kind of pleasure.

Once I had done that research for myself, it seemed worth putting somewhere other people could use it. That is most of what this site is.

Some of the pleasure is company. Much of the site's design and content evolved through weekly conversations since 2021 with Melissa Weiksnar, who has been in a forum since 2012 and served as its moderator for eight years. She had considered writing a book on forum moderation; having that experience shared instead in an ever-evolving forum site, built with AI, appealed to her much more. I have my own accumulated notes and opinions, and the site integrates those as well.

The site is a small fraction of what it could be, and I am looking forward to building it out as the forum community shows me what it needs.

What "built with AI" actually means here

It doesn't mean I typed "make me a website about forums" and published whatever came back. The process looked more like a months-long conversation between someone with fifteen years of experience in forums and other peer advisory groups and a tool that's very good at organizing knowledge, finding research, and generating clean prose on demand.

I would describe what an article needed to accomplish -- the argument, the audience, the emotional register. The AI would produce a draft. I would rewrite the parts that didn't sound right, push back on claims that oversimplified the methodology, and cut anything that read like a brochure. Some came out nearly finished on the first pass. Others required multiple rounds. The quality of the output depended heavily on the quality of the direction.

Forum Sage -- the AI chatbot embedded throughout this site -- is a different case. I designed its personality, its boundaries, and its knowledge base, drawing on the same forum methodology that Bob Halperin developed over two decades running HBS Alumni Forums. The AI built the underlying architecture. The result is a tool that can help members prepare for meetings, explore frameworks, and think through difficult topics anytime.

None of this replaces what happens in a forum meeting. That point is important enough that Forum Sage itself says so.

Why tell you

Three reasons.

First, because the forum methodology is built on honesty. The whole practice -- confidentiality, experience sharing, the no-advice rule -- only works when people trust each other enough to say what's actually happening. A site about radical candor probably shouldn't obscure how it was made.

Second, because you would likely figure it out anyway. The people who use this site are professionals, many of whom are deploying AI in their own organizations. AI is now an integral part of the HBS curriculum. This audience recognizes AI-assisted writing -- and would notice if the disclosure were missing.

Third, because the research on this topic is clear: proactive transparency causes less damage to trust than being found out later. A 2025 study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that disclosing AI use does reduce perceived legitimacy -- but being exposed by a third party is significantly worse. The asymmetry favors honesty. It usually does.

What AI can't do

AI tools are excellent at synthesizing research, finding patterns across large bodies of work, and generating readable prose about complex topics. They can explain a concept or summarize a theory faster and more accurately than most people. They don't get tired, they don't get defensive, and they can generate material for a meeting without running out of ideas.

What they don't have is felt experience. An AI can read about a group going silent after someone shared something they'd never said out loud, but it doesn't know what that silence feels like -- or what happens when a member's voice cracks, or when a moderator holds a pause that lasts ten seconds too long and something shifts in the room. It can describe these moments. It hasn't lived them.

This distinction matters for a site about forum, because the entire value proposition of forum is exactly what AI tools can't replicate: being truly seen by people who know you. Every article here was informed by real experience with real groups. AI tools helped put that experience into language. They didn't supply the judgment about what was worth saying.

A note on the human

Working this way is also genuinely fun, which is most of why I keep at it.

I started using AI to look into subjects sitting just outside my awareness -- questions I knew I had but didn't know how to research. It turned out to be less like a research librarian and more like an intellectual sparring partner with no time limit. It can hold a dozen references at once, tell me what the source material even is, and follow a thread as far as I want to take it.

A note on the chatbot

Forum Sage identifies itself as an AI assistant. It's trained on forum methodology -- the meeting structures, the exercises, the articles, the facilitation principles -- and it can help you prepare a presentation, design an exercise, or understand a concept you met in forum. Sage runs on your choice of leading AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini), and you can switch between them anytime, even mid-conversation. Your messages here are never used to train any model, and the Forum Support Services server keeps no copy -- conversations are saved only in your own browser, which is what My Sage Chats reads back.

Sage will occasionally make mistakes, and it can miss nuance that someone who has been in the room would catch. It's knowledgeable, not wise. Use it like a well-read colleague who hasn't been in the room: helpful for preparation, not a substitute for the real conversation.

Implications for your work and forum

You're probably wrestling with a version of this question in your own organization: how much to disclose about AI use, where it adds value, where it falls short. The peer advisory context just makes it sharper, because trust is the product.

Here's what building this site taught me. AI collapses the mechanical parts of knowledge work -- research, drafting, organizing -- from weeks into hours. What AI can't do is decide what's true, what matters, and what the audience actually needs to hear. That still takes a human who has done the work. The AI is the tool. The judgment is mine. And now you know.

The same goes for the site itself. If something here is wrong, unclear, or missing, use the Share feedback button at the top of any page. Reader feedback is how this site gets better, and much of what you're reading has already been reshaped by it.