In her recap, Rios Castro described how the discussion moved through everyone’s experiences integrating AI into their workflows: review agents, data pipelines, analytics. Then it turned to something more personal, notes with real community members. The DMs, the Slack threads, the guy asking why their favorite feature broke, again. The communications that make up a bulk of a Community Manager’s day. Tany relayed that the group was skeptical of using automated text for those types of messages, the ones meant to be interpersonal, not broadcast: “Real connection lives in the unpolished details—the lowercase style, the hyper-specific memes, the slight typos, and the playful language that signal a real human touch.”

That sentence has been stuck in the back of my head for over a week.

The typo isn’t the charm. It’s the receipt.

Think of a company newsletter, spotless, on-brand, not a comma out of place. You don’t read it carefully. You skim it, because you already know it was written once and sent to two hundred thousand people at the same time.

Now think of a text from a friend: “omw, 5 min, trafic is insaneee! ;)” Typos and all. You read that one immediately, because you know something a newsletter can’t fake: it was written just now, just for you, by someone thinking about you specifically while they were doing something else.

That’s the whole difference. A typo doesn’t build credibility by being cute. It earns trust by being proof of the thing that actually matters: someone’s limited attention was spent on you, right then, instead of being spent once and reused on everyone.

The problem underneath 

Here’s the part of that same panel that worries me more than the writing-style debate. The panelists described advocacy programs, the ones where people apply to represent a brand, were now being flooded with AI-generated admissions essays. Polished. Persuasive. Not real. Some teams have started running AI detection on the applications themselves, screening out fakes to protect the one thing an advocacy program is actually selling: a real person’s voice.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a team building a filter to catch a counterfeit of the exact thing the program exists to collect: real people who actually love what they’re applying to represent.

If it’s already happening to applications, it’s worth asking where else it’s happening. Somewhere, someone is waiting on a message from a person they trust to actually be there. Not a broadcast. Not a list. One message, meant for them. Here’s what I can’t answer: at what point does that message arrive polished and exactly on-topic enough that the person reading it can’t tell a human didn’t write it? Maybe it already has, to someone less AI-savvy, or someone with no reason to double-check. I don’t know. I don’t think the panelists did either. They just noticed something like it happening to their own applications.

A test, not a rule

I’m not sure how I really feel about AI, honestly. I have real concerns about water use, about what we lose as a species when the human touch goes out of things. I think creativity is one of the most human things we’ve got, not something a model can actually do, just something it can imitate. Usually poorly.

Here’s where I find myself landing as these tools show up in more and more places in my workflow, at least for now: AI earns its keep anywhere scale matters more than attention. Scanning ten thousand posts for a sentiment shift you’d never catch by hand. Summarizing a week of Discord threads before a stakeholder meeting. Reformatting a spreadsheet. Those feel like jobs for machines.

But a one-on-one reply isn’t an aggregate. It’s not a pattern across ten thousand people, it’s one person, asking you something specific. That’s where this test applies for community managers. Pull your last ten replies to actual members of your community. For each one, ask: what did I actually know about this person when I wrote it? Not “was I nice.” A real detail. That they’d asked the same question three months ago. That they mentioned a move, a new job, a kid’s first day of school. Something only they would recognize.

If you can’t point to that detail for most of them, AI’s not the problem. You’ve just stopped paying close enough attention, and no tool did that to you. The whole reason this job exists is that a person is on the other end of it, not a queue, not a ticket number, a person. That’s on you to protect.

I need to go check my own replies before I automate the wrong one.

I’ve always held that when you’re a Community Manager by trade, you end up doing a lot of the same things for your own office that you do during your “day job.” Planning the holiday party. Talking someone off the ledge after a rough Slack thread. Rewriting the internal announcement so it doesn’t sound like it was written by a lawyer. You’re the person with the skills to make it happen, even when it’s not technically your job.

It’s not a coincidence. The instincts that make someone good at building an external community (reading a room, noticing who’s gone quiet, knowing when to step in and when to just let people talk) don’t turn off at 6pm or stay pointed only at customers. They’re the same instincts a company needs turned inward.

There’s Already a Name For This
Some companies have figured this out and given it a title: Culture Manager, People Ops, Head of Culture. The good ones aren’t planning trivia night just because someone has to. They’re designing the culture on purpose: part therapist, part party planner, part internal anthropologist, watching the way a company actually behaves versus the way its values deck says it should.

These roles usually show up in bigger companies with enough headcount to justify a dedicated seat. But the need is actually greatest long before that.

Somewhere Between 50 and 200 People
A 20-person startup doesn’t have a culture problem yet. At that size, everyone absorbs the vibe by proximity. No translation required. The friction shows up later. Somewhere between 50 and 200 people. That is when you can’t fit everyone in one room anymore, the founders stop onboarding every new hire, and “how we do things here” stops being something people feel and becomes something you have to say out loud.

That’s the moment a company either stays rooted in what made it worth joining, or quietly becomes just another place people work. It is the same stakes David Spinks lays out in The Business of Belonging, just applied to the team instead of the customers.

Nobody’s watching for that transition on purpose. It happens in the gap between “we’re small enough that culture takes care of itself” and “we’re big enough to hire someone for it.” That gap is usually much longer than anyone plans for.

Underused Expertise, One Slack Channel Over
Community Managers are trained to see these exact shifts. Reading the health of a group (knowing when trust is fraying, when someone’s about to burn out, when the elephant in the room matters most) is the whole job. We do it all day for people who don’t even work at the company. Turning that attention toward the people who do isn’t a stretch; it’s underused expertise sitting one Slack channel over. CMX has highlighted this crossover directly: the same mechanics that build belonging externally are what it takes to build a tight team culture internally.

Every startup might not need a full-time Head of Culture on day one. But every startup should ask who is already doing that work anyway. Quietly, unofficially, and without credit. And whether it’s time to actually give them the mandate.

Every afternoon, as school papers are tossed aside and glue sticks come out, we enter collage mode. It starts with a pile of clippings—some neatly cut, others ripped with wild enthusiasm. “This goes here,” he declares, slapping down a penguin next to a taco, as if they were meant to be side by side. Sometimes, he’ll step back, studying the arrangement like a tiny art critic before adding another unexpected layer—maybe a spaceship over a field of daisies. It’s chaotic, brilliant, and absolutely his.

Collage is one of those art forms that welcomes imperfection. There are no rules, just an invitation to create. A smudged glue streak? Adds texture. A torn edge? Makes it more interesting. Watching my son work, I realize how much we adults overthink creativity. He doesn’t worry if the colors match or if a dolphin floating in outer space makes sense. He just goes for it. And honestly? It’s inspiring.

So, if you find yourself with a pile of old magazines and a curious kiddo, grab some scissors and join in. Cut, paste, rearrange. Let the creative chaos take over. And who knows? You might just find yourself loving the way a penguin and a taco look together.

Yes, the Grim Reaper. My 6-year-old’s current obsession. Thanks to the cheerful and popular step-by-step drawing tutorials on the Art for Kids Hub YouTube channel (9.5 million followers and counting!), we were able to draw a “cute” version of this spooky character just in time for Halloween.

We discovered these great videos during covid times, when my younger kiddo was taking a nap and I needed to keep my then-kindergartner oldest kiddo quiet. The host Rob draws alongside one of his own kids, which gives the whole thing a cozy, family vibe. The video also shows two separate drawings being created with the same directions – one from a grown-up and one from a kid. I swear this has made it SO much easier for my littles to be a little more risky with their art, since the kids in the video are rarely “perfect”.

It’s also become our wind-down before bed ritual: we grab our markers, (I always have a black sharpie at the ready!) and cue up our favorite videos from our favorite art family. Drawing together has become such a simple but powerful way to connect. It gives my kids and I time to slow down, be creative, and make something just for fun. No pressure to be perfect. No rules on what a Grim Reaper “should” look like. Just a shared moment of spooky silliness.

So if you’re looking for an easy and eerie way to celebrate Halloween with your kid, I highly recommend breaking out the markers and letting Art for Kids Hub guide you into the spooky unknown.

Our Favorite Halloween Drawing Tutorials from Art for Kids Hub

• Halloween Cake Pop
• Spooky Haunted House
• Cute Halloween Friends
• Cute Grim Reaper (our masterpiece above)

Let the spooky doodles begin!

The class was called Altered Board Books and the instructor was Stephanie Jucker – an artist, painter and book art maker. I was so excited to finally get back into the art groove and grabbed a few baby board books from the shelf and headed off to the San Francisco Center for the Book for a real life book class!

There were only 5 other people in the class plus the teacher and the tables were REALLY spaced out (open door, lots of air filters) and I felt SUPER safe, which given it was my first time back indoors was a great relief since we were spending a few hours together.

We learned how to prep the pages using sand paper and then got to work painting and collaging directly into the former baby books. Here’s a few of my favorite pages I made:

All in all a great afternoon learning some fun new techniques including how to do little pop-ups inside the book – which is SO FUN to do.

1. Medical Twitter

Many of us became armchair medical experts this year, reading graphs, charts, and even dipping into medical research articles in an attempt to better understand Covid, the vaccine progress, and all of the other medical swirl around the pandemic. Following actual doctors and medical researchers on Twitter helped me stop catastrophizing, allowed me to sift thru the noise and focus on the things actual experts found important.

In particular, the posts of UCSF’s Dr. Bob Watcher were a consistent source of clear information. When things seemed the most dark last year, I’d read his most recent updates and his level-headed expertise never failed to make me feel better.

2. Doubling Down on Technology

I’ve worked in tech for 20+ years, but 2020 was the year I fully embraced a lot of tech that I’d ignored, resisted or only used sporadically. Especially around shopping for basics. I’ve used Amazon and Target online for occasional hard to find “household” items, but usually trekked out to a physical Target, Costco or neighborhood spot for things like toilet paper, paper towels, diapers and fresh food. Shipt, Good Eggs (referral – save $25), ImperfectFoods (referral – save $10) and Instacart quickly solved the “What will I feed the kids tonight, I can’t think and what is time anyway?” conundrum.

And like so many others, streaming media kept us all a little saner. Netflix and Disney+ helped distract the toddler while the first grader was distance learning at home, silly little iPhone games distracted my stressed-out pandemic brain, and zoom-based art, music and gymnastic classes kept my oldest kiddo connected to his passions while he wasn’t able to do them in person.

And of course, Facetime and the fun House Party app also kept us close to our far-away parents/grandparents who we didn’t get to see all face-to-face all year. House Party in particular kept my six year old interested in talking longer by layering an Uno game or Karaoke round on top of conversation with his grandparents.

(Virtually) Live Music

It seems a bit weird to list Live Music as a saving grace during this terrible, no good, awful, year for live events. But stick with me here. Since I was old enough to drive, I’ve been driving (or walking or flying) myself to concerts. I’ve probably enjoyed thousand of live shows over the years, but a few bands have stuck around as my all time favorites. As life, work and two little kiddos keep me from going out as often as I’d like, I’ve prioritized a few “must see” bands that I never miss. At the top of that list is the Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies. In another life, I ran a paper fanzine (Nakedhead) for them back in the early 2000s, I used to spend hours online with other fans and I’ve traveled across the US and Canada to see them 64 times live since 1994. I’ve also seen current/former band members in other bands, side projects, and special events over the years, including seeing former BNL singer/guitarist Steven Page‘s solo shows.

Early in covid-times, Steven started holding first one, than weekly zoom concerts in his basement home studio, playing his own solo work and the hits, deep cuts, and eventually the full albums, from his work with the Barenaked Ladies. The weekly 2-3 hour show, held on Saturday afternoon, quickly became a mental health/community connection point for me during lockdown.

This connection grew every week and every song, shared together with the faces inside the little squares, all of us broadcasting from all around the world. I can’t imagine the weirdness of singing to an audience you can’t hear singing along, but Zoom doesn’t allow for easy audience participation and Steven’s early attempt to get us to sing along was a spectacular disaster. For the New Years Eve show, the community came together to bring the “noise” back to the show – pre-recording a “sing along” to one of his songs and creating what was one of the most emotionally powerful moments for me for the entire year.

You can spot me, my husband and my oldest in the video below. There was nary a dry eye in the virtual house after that was over. It was such a cathartic way to celebrate the ending of 2020.

It’s not ok.

Blogger/author Mark Manson wrote about hope in his 2019 book Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope and I’m not sure he knew specifically how needed hope would be in 2020. This quote keeps sticking in my head:

“To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community. “Control” means we feel as though we’re in control of our own life, that we can affect our fate. “Values” means we find something important enough to work toward, something better, that’s worth striving for. And “community” means we are part of a group that values the same things we do and is working toward achieving those things. Without a community, we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursuing. And without control, we feel powerless to pursue anything. Lose any of the three, and you lose the other two. Lose any of the three, and you lose hope.”

Mark Manson (emphasis mine)

My people help me survive. This morning my BFF texted me, “Today’s home schooling lesson: terrifying sky.” and somehow the fear I felt when thinking about explaining why the sky was Orange and terrifying — lessened. Community helps. Now I just have to convince my brain that a dark orange sky all day is totally fine. No. Wait. It’s not.

Last week, my oldest and I tried our hands at tie dying a bunch of white shirts. It’s been a LONG time since I tie dyed anything (maybe high school?) so we watched a few YouTube videos first. Thankfully, tie dying is a very forgiving craft and we were pretty excited with the results.

Before…

I ordered a few shirts from Target and they arrived all clean and full of possibility.

Time to Tie Dye

We did a few different styles, the classic “spiral”, the “bullseye” and the “crinkle” — for my shirt, I did a combo crinkle and hand-painting look that turned out really cool.

The Rainbow of Results

Super excited with how everything turned out — my little rainbow loving guy in particular loved the bright colors!

We used all of the dye I bought, so I immediately ordered some more so we could finish off the white shirts we bought. Plus, as soon as I posted the photos to Facebook, my mom wanted us to make her one too! Will let ya’ll know how round two turned out.

Using a metal ring made it a little easier, and I started by weaving the evergreen clippings around it, not worrying about the bits that are flying off in all directions – it’s just wreath personality.

Then we added some other decorative pieces, little berries, other plant pieces, ribbon, etc. It’s really up to you what you want it to look like!

Mine ended up being pretty simple — maybe next year I’ll try something more complicated. Happy holidays!

Watch the whole clip here: