5 ms·

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

by rcarr 3y ago

tyg13 3y ago
I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators. To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. At least if the mods of some sub go haywire, users can always create another sub. With widespread use of AI moderation, there'd be nowhere to go to escape.
- jrnichols 3y ago
  > I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators. THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi. The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah." We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing. Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.
  - CommitSyn 3y ago
    Strange, I had all of my accounts banned but my spouses weren't. Same wifi. Appeal process was over 48h later and I was unbanned. If they were doing that, it seems any account that ever used Tor or a VPN would be banned. Maybe they saw your "it was my neighbor on my wifi, I swear!" and reflex-nuked. Also, mods don't suspend accounts, employees do. From user reports. Then admins reinstate or don't. I wouldn't put it past them to auto-nuke any appeal with the word neighbor, though. That's the "my dog ate my homework" equivalent of trying to get out of a warranted ban.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  FWIW, I've played around with Palm a bit and if you feed it some rules it's pretty good at explaining which rule a "bad" post violates. It could be a good initial triage
- switch007 3y ago
  Kind of happens already with auto moderator.
__loam 3y ago
We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.
- rcarr 3y ago
  Yeah, but if the tech keeps improving at the rate it has been then more and more of it is going to get automated. And tbh, that’s a good thing. Moderating is a horrible job that frequently causes mental health issues for the people who have to do it.
- adventured 3y ago
  Something like GPT 4 didn't exist 5, 10 years ago, re Zuckerberg. It won't take much further improvement for eg OpenAI's models to effectively handle moderation based on learning from instruction for a given community's moderation needs. There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity. This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon. Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Pretty arrogant to call it a comical failure when OpenAI is openly stating they're not training GPT 5. I think people who think we can do much better than GPT 4 without insane cost scaling and a nuts amount of data (that's going to get harder to collect when regulations start to kick in), probably don't know what they're talking about. We're deep into diminishing returns here.
    - dTal 3y ago
rurp 3y ago
I expect that AI will increase the need for human moderation. LLMs are better at producing passable spam than identifying it, so any gains in AI moderation will be more than offset. I actually worry that AI spam will become too powerful for even good human+AI moderation and we'll see the death of high quality open discussions online.

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

by rcarr 3y ago

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators. To be fair, that's still possible (and sometimes the case) with human moderators, though I find that experience to be exceptionally rare, and the remedy (just don't use that subreddit) easier to perform. At least if the mods of some sub go haywire, users can always create another sub. With widespread use of AI moderation, there'd be nowhere to go to escape.

jrnichols 3y ago
> I can't wait to make a seemingly-innocuous post on some subreddit, only to have that post removed for "failing to meet community guidelines" and receive absolutely zero intelligible response from the AI moderators. THat's how their whole "Appeal" process is now. We had accounts suspended permanently for daring to question the mods at a large subreddit, and they nuked every account that logged in from our home IP. Wife's account, which was innocent, was permanently suspended. Same with housemate behind us that used our WiFi. The appeal process? Within 5 minutes we got a useless and canned message that was along the lines of "After careful review, it was been determined that... blah blah blah." We've since made new accounts, but it was 100+ days later, and all of our reddit usage is way down as a result. My account alone was 8+ years old. Gone, no appeal, nothing. Reports in /r/help were that they used AI to handle appeals. Not sure if it's true, but it feels like it is.
- CommitSyn 3y ago
  Strange, I had all of my accounts banned but my spouses weren't. Same wifi. Appeal process was over 48h later and I was unbanned. If they were doing that, it seems any account that ever used Tor or a VPN would be banned. Maybe they saw your "it was my neighbor on my wifi, I swear!" and reflex-nuked. Also, mods don't suspend accounts, employees do. From user reports. Then admins reinstate or don't. I wouldn't put it past them to auto-nuke any appeal with the word neighbor, though. That's the "my dog ate my homework" equivalent of trying to get out of a warranted ban.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
FWIW, I've played around with Palm a bit and if you feed it some rules it's pretty good at explaining which rule a "bad" post violates. It could be a good initial triage
switch007 3y ago
Kind of happens already with auto moderator.

__loam 3y ago

We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.

rcarr 3y ago
Yeah, but if the tech keeps improving at the rate it has been then more and more of it is going to get automated. And tbh, that’s a good thing. Moderating is a horrible job that frequently causes mental health issues for the people who have to do it.
adventured 3y ago
Something like GPT 4 didn't exist 5, 10 years ago, re Zuckerberg. It won't take much further improvement for eg OpenAI's models to effectively handle moderation based on learning from instruction for a given community's moderation needs. There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity. This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon. Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.
- __loam 3y ago
  Pretty arrogant to call it a comical failure when OpenAI is openly stating they're not training GPT 5. I think people who think we can do much better than GPT 4 without insane cost scaling and a nuts amount of data (that's going to get harder to collect when regulations start to kick in), probably don't know what they're talking about. We're deep into diminishing returns here.
  - dTal 3y ago

rurp 3y ago

I expect that AI will increase the need for human moderation. LLMs are better at producing passable spam than identifying it, so any gains in AI moderation will be more than offset. I actually worry that AI spam will become too powerful for even good human+AI moderation and we'll see the death of high quality open discussions online.