Hi Grant,
I think to engage people interested in the science side of astronomy you have to be where the largest numbers who might be interested can be found which is in the astro forums and the profile of the BAA is very low there.
I spend a lot of time out there in various groups engaging with people interested in spectroscopy, promoting spectroscopy, showing examples and helping them. While most of it is in the science sections of general astro groups or special interest groups (If you look at what is going on in the Cloudy Nights Scientific Amateur Astronomy subforum for example, there is some interesting stuff going on there), I also drop in on the “pretty picture” imagers from time to time to give a science view of what is in their images, show them a spectrum, explain why light leaks in their filters is turning the red stars in their narrow band filtered images into planetary nebulae etc which generates quite a bit of interest. As part of that I also try to raise the profile of the BAA where I can, linking to the gallery, video talks, spectra in the BAA database, section content etc which at least brings them to the BAA website. Jeremy is on Stargazers Lounge and there are a couple of others but generally I don’t often see other BAA members.
Concerning AI, it can only find the good stuff if it is out there. In Cloudy Nights there is someone building an impressive “point an click” application which can take an image full of slitless spectra taken using a Star Analyser and identify objects in it, generate fully calibrated spectra and roughly classify them. He is using AI a lot and commented that most of the queries about using the Star Analyser lead back to stuff I put out there.
