The role of AI in content moderation

Companies grapple with managing a vast amount of content published online, from social media posts to forum comments. Inappropriate, offensive, or illegal content can significantly harm a brand’s reputation. However, manual content moderation is tedious, costly, and poorly scalable. This is where AI steps in. AI in content moderation can enhance your brand’s protection online. AI tools are revolutionizing the way companies moderate their online content, offering more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective solutions. So let’s go behind the scenes of this fascinating topic and take a look at the tools that make it easier to scale the moderation process. You’ll see why it makes sense to leverage the potential of AI in this area. Read on.

The role of AI in content moderation – table of contents

Why is content moderation critical to your business?

Protecting the image and reputation of a brand is one of the key reasons why companies should take content moderation seriously. Inappropriate or offensive materials can easily alienate customers, undermine trust in the company, and leave a lasting negative impact online. Without proper moderation, harmful content can spread online quickly.

As numerous cases have shown, even a single controversial publication can stir up a media storm. In 2017, Amazon faced a wave of criticism when its platform featured deeply disturbing content glorifying Nazism and the Holocaust. Similar scandals affected brands like Walmart, Sears, and Nordstrom when their online stores sold clothing with racist symbols. Without effective moderation, this can lead to boycotts, financial losses, and serious damage to reputation.

Content moderation helps companies maintain desired standards and values across all materials they publish. This is especially crucial in today’s digital age, where companies aim to foster engaged online communities around their brands. Open discussion forums become an easy target for spammers, trolls, and haters. Proper moderation helps create a safe, friendly space for valuable interactions.

Content moderation methods

When talking about content moderation, it is important to distinguish between two main approaches – pre-moderation and post-moderation. Both have their benefits and challenges.

Pre-moderation is about reviewing and approving content before publishing it. This approach allows full control over what appears online under a brand’s name. Its downside is the time-consuming process, which delays content publication. In the era of social media and the expected rapid response from brands, this can pose a significant challenge.

On the flip side, post-moderation focuses on reviewing already published content and removing undesirable material. Although this type of moderation does not slow down the publication process, it carries the risk that inappropriate content circulates on the internet for a certain period before being addressed. This may expose the brand to criticism and further spread of harmful material.

Combining both methods seems to be the optimal solution – automation using artificial intelligence can significantly speed up pre-moderation, while human moderators focus on more complex cases within post-moderation.

An important consideration is deciding which types of content should undergo moderation. This can include:

texts – for example, comments posted by users,
images – thanks to AI image recognition capabilities, this has become much simpler,
videos – where AI tools are increasingly effective.

AI in content moderation

Traditional, human content moderation is becoming an increasingly challenging task in the age of ubiquitous social media and the vast amount of generated content. As shown by research from the United States Air Force, every month the military must review approximately 750,000 posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Manual moderation of such a volume of content would be extremely time-consuming and costly.

This is where tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning step in. They can revolutionize the moderation process, as they can automate it and scale it with high accuracy.

A key advantage of AI is its ability to instantly analyze massive amounts of data – text, images, video – and accurately classify it as appropriate or undesirable. What’s more, machine learning-based systems get better at this task with each additional sample of data they process.

Implementing AI tools for content moderation allows companies to automate and speed up the process. Instead of manually reviewing content, advanced algorithms can quickly identify potentially problematic materials, saving time and money compared to traditional methods.

Source: DALL·E 3, prompt: Marta M. Kania (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martamatyldakania/)

AI content moderation software

There are several advanced AI-based tools on the market that can effectively assist organizations in the content moderation process. Let’s take a closer look at two leading solutions: OpenAI Moderation Endpoint and ClarifAI.

OpenAI Moderation Endpoint (https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation) is a content classification system developed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. It is specifically designed to identify a wide range of unwanted or harmful content such as violence, hate, nudity, drugs, or spam.

How does this tool work? First, the user submits text, an image, or a brief description of a video to the system. Then, advanced language and vision models analyze this content for the presence of unwanted elements. As a result, the user receives a detailed report with a numerical assessment and a list of category labels indicating whether the material is undesirable.

The key advantage of OpenAI Moderation is its scalability and speed. The system can generate tens of thousands of assessments per second, allowing for easy integration with even the most heavily loaded streams of data generated by large companies. As a result, this solution enables efficient and cost-effective content moderation on an unprecedented scale.

Source: OpenAI (https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation/quickstart)

Another noteworthy AI tool for moderation is ClarifAI (https://www.clarifai.com/). It specializes in analyzing and classifying images and video content for the presence of undesirable or sensitive material. The advanced computer vision (CV) technology used here can recognize a wide range of topics – from violence, drugs, and pornography to more subtle issues like alcohol consumption or tobacco.

ClarifAI is used today by hundreds of companies around the world, including giants like Canva, P&G, and Humana, to effectively moderate images and videos. The platform offers AI models that can be customized to meet specific business needs.

Summary

As companies’ digital presence continues to grow and brands expand their online reach, managing the content published under their name becomes a key challenge. Effective and scalable moderation of this content is essential for protecting the reputation and image of the brand.

AI tools like OpenAI Moderation and ClarifAI help automate and speed up moderation processes, offering impressive accuracy while significantly reducing costs. They allow for scaling moderation beyond what humans alone can achieve.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that human moderators will become entirely redundant. They will still be needed for more complex analyses and resolving questionable cases. However, by intelligently combining human and machine capabilities, companies can build a truly efficient and future-proof content moderation system.

Implementing AI in content moderation is a step that every modern brand should consider today. It’s a key tool for ensuring online safety, protecting reputation, and maintaining high standards.

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Author: Robert Whitney
JavaScript expert and instructor who coaches IT departments. His main goal is to up-level team productivity by teaching others how to effectively cooperate while coding.
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