How self managed HOA's can use AI to decrease work load.

This really applies to any any HOA, but I only started looking at AI when we became self managed. When AI came out a couple of years ago I thought it was digital diareah of the mouth.

1. Secretary no longer needs to take notes/minutes.
There are several companies that have AI notetakers. Just google Best AI Meeting Note Takers 2024 and you will find some videos about the more popular ones. Used to take 15 min or longer to write board minutes, now it's done in 1 min and takes a few more to review and add or subtract a few things.

2. Chat Bots for HOA Websites. Our online hoa mgt software uses this. We type in a bunch of FAQ and the bot will only use data from that FAQ, Unlike other AI bots, it never hallucinates and gives made up info. It simply says I do not know. I've tested it throughlly and it's never made a mistake.

3. legal research. I can upload an entire book on HOA law, my favorite is Common Interest Communities in NC 2nd Edition 900 pages, and ask the AI to tell me what chapters deal with ARC laws. Or What the legal requirements are before a fine is put on a home. By forcing the AI to use a book as the reference the answers are spot on. this book is

4. solve disagreements with how survey's or ballots are worded. If board members can't agree with how a ballot measure is to sound they can put it though AI to give it a more neutral tone.

I'm not sold on the following yet, but they are already out there:

5. Phone answering service. There are even companies that specialize in HOA customer service only for about $100/month. More Generic solutions are $30/month. They can even make outgoing calls. Hey Mr. Jones did you forget to pay your HOA dues this past month in a naughty sexy voice or maybe a darth vadar voice, lol automated collections.

how are you using AI to save time?

Great example of how communities can work smarter not harder. Thanks for sharing!

I copied our bylaws section on member meetings and asked AI for all the steps to hold the annual meeting but not the meeting itself. It gave a very good set of the steps restated from our bylaws (which I did not copy here for the sake of brevity) and omitted stuff that was not a step.

Based on this, I think AI can read our governing docs and give advice, subject to review. A time may soon be coming when AI can replace the association attorney and management company for (most) advice.

It also added these points that were not part of the bylaw section that I copied to it:

Meeting Logistics:
Arrange logistical details such as venue setup, equipment needs (microphones, projectors), and accessibility for all members.

Recording and Documentation:
Ensure that minutes of the meeting are recorded accurately. Minutes should include details of discussions [really???], decisions made, and actions taken during the meeting.

Post-Meeting Follow-Up:
After the meeting, distribute the minutes to all members [why???] and update records accordingly. Implement any decisions or actions agreed upon during the meeting.

By following these steps outlined in your association's bylaws, you can effectively plan and prepare for holding the annual meeting of your owners association while ensuring compliance with legal requirements and procedural guidelines.and omitted stuff that was not a step.

AI is already running our board.

in what ways?

Yeah, the legal book I reference a lot includes a lot of examples from states other than North Carolina. I have to always put in the prompt to ignore any legal cases outside of NC and I also tell AI to quote the page number for reference. Otherwise ChatGPT often references out of state legal cases that are mentioned in the book.

that being said there are legal AI bots I see advertised for law firm useage.

I'm going to download the planned community act, non profit act, and our own governing documents and merge into one pdf file and see if I can trick the AI bot.

I fed AI our states non profit act, Planned comunity act, and Governing docs for our HOA. Asked it if we were required to return surplus funds to owners at the end of the year and it said yes. Unfortunately that is the wrong answer for our pre 1999 HOA. It would of been the correct answer for post 1999 HOA's though.
when I feed it the legal book only it doesn't make the same mistake. Probably because the legal book includes a lot of interpretations of the laws.
Actual prompts below. At least it's polite when it makes a mistake, lol.

wait you just told me that G.S. 47F-3-114 would apply to the HOA and now you are telling me it does not. which is it?

ChatGPT

I apologize for the confusion. Upon double-checking the information, I can clarify that G.S. 47F-3-114 does not apply to pre-1999 HOAs unless explicitly stated in the declaration. Here is the correct interpretation:

G.S. 47F-1-102 outlines the applicability of the North Carolina Planned Community Act to communities created before January 1, 1999. The specific sections that apply to these older communities are listed in G.S. 47F-1-102(c), and G.S. 47F-3-114 is not among them.
Therefore, G.S. 47F-3-114, which deals with the handling of surplus funds, does not automatically apply to pre-1999 communities unless their governing documents explicitly incorporate it.

Humor.

The trouble with ChatGPT et al. is that the output sounds very plausible. As I mentioned previously, it even fooled a couple of professional lawyers. The very last thing I'd want to do is sift through AI output looking for the one obscure fact that turns an entire document into worthless garbage. It's a poor use of anyone's time, especially for those whose time is already in short supply. And if you're not a professional who's expert in the particular area, you probably won't be capable of vetting AI's output.

In other words, this doesn't decrease anyone's workload. Instead it exchanges tasks which a person maybe kinda sorta has some competence in for tasks that the person is unqualified for. If anything it will increase the workload since they'll eventually have to call in the pros to clean up the messes.

It definitely has saved me time, like any tool you have to know it's limitations. It writes minutes like a boss with minor edits or additions. out website chat bot is spot on.

I've never let the AI use the internet as it's source material, I always restrict it to a certain document or meeting.letting it access the whole internet is not a good way to get targeted result.s

Facts aside, its writing is quite good and might help others to become better writers.

I envision a declaration with a now unlawful restrictive covenant on children's play equipment or a now unlawful covenant that says only White people may occupy homes in a subdivision. This declaration would be fed into an AI bot and give ridiculous responses that will hold the board out to liability.

Ignorant directors will stay ignorant.

Sounds to me like WendyM5 is using some version of AI that does allow the user to feed in only specific sources and not the entire internet.

Essentially such an AI system is doing, in part, what many of us do: Keyword searches.

I agree. An AI bot is also better at coming up with synonyms that would work better in the search.
Please ask your AI software if, for an owners' vote at an NC HOA, the HOA can count a non-vote or an abstention as a yes vote.

I just spent five minutes looking for this in the NC Nonprofit Corp statute but not the HOA statute.

This came up for the state of Michigan recently, in another thread. I believe AI software trained only on Michigan statutes would get the response correct.

FWIW, recently a number of authors have been complaining because Google et al. have been feeding literary works to their AIs (which presumably will generate ridiculous amounts of money for their developers) without compensating the authors.

It's an interesting point. On one hand, how is this different from the books that kids read in school? (Presumably the schools pay for copies of the books, so the authors are being compensated.) On the other hand, if authors are helping obscenely wealthy companies become even more obscenely wealthy without the authors' consent or compensation, maybe that's a problem?

How do you feed data ChatGPT? What are the steps?

AI answer:

There are multiple ways to feed data into ChatGPT, including:

Using OpenAI's API: This method is complicated and lengthy.

Storing data in an external knowledge base: This method can be simple and expanded upon as needed.

Uploading a PDF file: Users can log into their ChatGPT Plus account, select ChatGPT-4, and click the paperclip icon to upload a PDF file. Text-based PDFs can upload in seconds, but image-based PDFs may take longer.

Creating an obfuscated version of a dataset: Users can then use ChatGPT to explore the dataset and test hypotheses.

Here are some other steps that can be taken when feeding data into ChatGPT:

Splitting data into smaller pieces
Text vectorization (embedding)
Selecting a large language model
Preparing data for querying
Cleaning and normalizing data
Converting data into a text-based format
Adding domain-relevant context to questions
Describing what model should and shouldn't answer
Telling ChatGPT how to format responses

There is a difference in artificial, lack of and illogical.

Who is reviewing these transcripts to verify their accuracy? Or is the board just assuming that "it's AI - of course it's accurate"?

What happens if a transcript doesn't match the board's memory of what was said? What happens if the board's memory is accurate and the transcript is wrong - but the board then changes course because it assumes the transcript must be correct and they must be mistaken?

This is what I meant when I said that AI doesn't necessarily save time. It only changes the nature of what the board has to spend their time on. And they do have to spend time on this, because
the board is ultimately responsible for all of it. I can pretty much guarantee that most if not all boards will blindly trust whatever nonsense the AI is putting out.

Having watched my share of things such as live trials on the web, with Google transcription turned on, I'm not at all impressed by the accuracy of what it thinks it's capturing. Capturing accurate voice transcripts is hard, and accuracy is affected by the quality of the equipment, acoustics, peoples' accents, their stuffy noses and sore throats, the varying speeds at which they speak, and a lot of little niggles that an AI doesn't know about and can't correct for. And more to the point, at trials there is still a person who's responsible for recording what's being said. When you're dealing with legal proceedings, actual words matter - and so far the legal system hasn't agreed that AI is up to the task. I say that if it's not good enough for the law, it's not good enough for business either.

It's almost certainly being done in the cloud. AI requires massive amounts of computing power, far in excess of what any HOA would have available to it. (In fact, energy consumption is one of the criticisms of AI.)

Oh yes. Let's include in the Minutes owner Jones screaming at owner Smith that she is a ___ (name your sexist, racist, religious et cetera slur).

"Artificial Intelligence" is not the correct name for a tool that lacks intelligence.

Yup. This is one of the reasons the board would have to review the output and not just assume it's correct.

Owners may also have issues with their words being recorded in this way.

Finally, meeting minutes are not verbatim transcriptions. They're a cut-and-dried record of motions and votes. Having a record of all of the extraneous chitchat that can occur during a meeting just gives people more junk to wade through if they're looking for something in particular.

I agree. Well said.

This has been an interesting conversation, with good insight on advantages and disadvantages of using AI in HOA management – some of this can also apply to HOAs that have property managers! If it can cut down on a property manager’s busy work, this can result in more time to help the board with addressing some of the hairier association issues like planning next year’s budget or tweaking the collection policy. I found this article on the pros and cons of AI, which could be a great introduction to HOAs considering how they might use it:

https://www.simplilearn.com/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-artificial-intelligence-article

The advantages I really like are reducing human error, improving decision-making, being available 24/7 and helping with daily tasks.
On the other hand, boards need to be mindful of the disadvantages. ElleN noted a big one, where a homeowner or board member (or several) wouldn’t know if or when AI gave incorrect advice, such as including details of discussions in board meeting minutes, as Kerry noted. You don’t always know what you don’t know, and just like boards should expect the property manager or attorney to do all of their thinking for them, one shouldn’t avoid reading their own documents or a reserve study just because some of the words have more than three syllables and it’s the size of a Harry Potter novel.

Note #s 6 (encouraging human laziness) and 9 (bias) in this article which lists some of the disadvantages. I’m especially concerned about bias – I’ve seen articles about law enforcement using more AI and we already know there’s an issue with over policing of communities of color. For that matter, #s 14 (lack of common sense) and 15 (no ethics) can lead to bigger problems if the board using it are already inclined to bad behavior.

As time goes on, I’d love to see other people take up this subject and start more conversations on this website discussing their experiences (good and bad) on how they used AI used in their community, along with the pros and cons so we can all learn. Personally, I’d start with the end – what do we want to accomplish if we bring in AI? Reducing workload from busy work (whatever that is) is good, but are you doing it because you don't want to put in the thinking yourself because reading reserve studies is boring or don't want to be cussed out when the board denies an exterior change request? What are our biggest issues right now and could AI help us there? I might start with the “busy work” and them move to the larger issues, such as analyzing the reserve study. Throughout this process, boards and homeowners (from where we get board members) should remember that living in a HOA and navigating the documents and rules still require careful thought – you can’t just put data in the computer and let it do all the work, especially if you don’t bother to review it yourself.

I'm using an AI note taking service that rhymes with bOTHER. It's named after an animal that is similar to a seal. Takes screen shots every few minutes, creates the minutes and includes audio recording with a transcript thats 99% accurate.

it's better than what the previous secretary did. And yeah I look over them for any mistakes.

Also making google forms/survey's automatically from them by asking the AI to generate the javascript to make the forms automatically in google app script. Gonna try out making google slides automatically from an agenda next.

made an automatic TEXT reply message when people text our google phone number. I'm gonna fool around with giving users options and since I can't write javascript, AI can hopefully help me generate that.

Gonna try out a $30/month AI phone answering service this Fall.

All this being said, I've wasted so much time reseraching AI I could probably used that same amount of time to manually do most of the above.

If you mean researching AI answers to determine their accuracy, then your honesty is admirable. It is why I value exchanges with you.