The cyberspace consists of more than 4.5 billion users, who produce a wide variety of content. Considering this massive explosion of user-generated content, moderating it becomes a priority for Content Moderation.
In the past, content moderation was restricted mainly to social media platforms. However, more and more entities, especially digital media brands, recognize the value of content moderation as they look to remove spam, explicit content, or inappropriate materials from their brand’s website or online community.
Note that AI has been used for content moderation for quite some time, but the process still requires human intervention. After many years of development, AI has been adjusted significantly to deliver more value and to serve as a dependable tool for content moderation.
Leading online engagement companies like Viafoura assist businesses in cultivating a positive and safe environment in their communities using AI moderation. In truth, a calculated mix of AI and human effort can very effectively root out inappropriate content. This ensures that brands can maintain their reputation while growing their community.
How has content moderation evolved with AI?
Global businesses traditionally hired admins and human moderators to keep explicit content in check. However, with the proliferation of content in forums, communities, and social media platforms, investing in AI and machine learning strategies have proved to be cost-effective. By deploying these technologies, website admins can automatically root out inappropriate content before human intervention becomes a factor.
To give you a better idea, let’s take a look at Facebook’s statistics. The AI moderation mechanism of Facebook in 2019 successfully detected as much as 99.9% of spam text. Moreover, the automated system weeded out 99.3% of content related to terrorist propaganda, 98.9% of graphic content with violence, and 99.2% of content on sexual exploitation and child nudity.
With businesses becoming dependent on user-generated content, it makes sense to have these filtering mechanisms in place. But deploying AI for content moderation does not eliminate the involvement of human moderators. These professionals often remain in the loop and review only selected content that requires personal, human discretion.
AI-backed systems are capable of accomplishing most of the basic tasks required in moderation. This way, intelligent content moderation tools significantly save time and effort for admins and live moderation team members.
AI-backed content moderation: How it works?
In the age of information, businesses habitually struggle to distinguish toxic content from useful ones. Most importantly, they need to eliminate such content before community users see them. AI-backed content moderation systems empower businesses to streamline their filtering process and scale faster.
In a typical environment, AI-backed content moderation systems work in perfect sync with human moderators. The latter takes care of the more nuanced and contextual matters.
Depending on the format in which user-generated content is available, intelligent systems detect problems and issues without any issues, even recognizing them and filtering them out by format. Here are three of the most common types of content that AI can detect and filter.
1. Image moderation
By blending visual search techniques based on computer vision and text classification mechanisms, AI-backed systems can detect malicious images. The algorithms in advanced systems are trained to locate the image position.
- Image processing algorithms can detect different areas in the image and classify them based on specific criteria.
- Along with this, some systems also use OCR (object character recognition) to identify explicit images and eliminate them.
- Once the software flags an image as inappropriate, human moderators review the same and make the final call.
2. Video moderation
Using AI and computer vision, smart moderating systems can filter inappropriate videos in online communities. However, the process is complex and takes more time than image moderation. Each video needs to be moderated frame by frame. Besides this, the audio information in the file also needs to be scrutinized.
AI systems are smart enough to handle hundreds of videos in quick time and flag inappropriate ones. This way, they can save valuable hours for the human moderators.
3. Text moderation
Dedicated algorithms for natural language processing summarize the interpretation of texts, considering the tone and emotion that it carries. These algorithms are trained to classify texts and scrutinize the sentiment that it carries. In the process, the sentiment analyzer can detect texts carrying sarcasm, threats, anger, and bullying.
Accordingly, the texts come under negative, positive, or neutral categories. Moreover, the system automatically extracts the names and locations of people and brands. Brands also benefit from knowledge base text moderation with some advanced AI tools. These systems have built-in databases to predict how appropriate the conversation is, and it can generate scammer alerts or flag inappropriate texts.
Why is human intervention still needed?
Despite all the sophistication, AI systems are prone to errors. Sometimes, they fail to differentiate valid content from invalid ones. Therefore, the systems might flag appropriate content as inappropriate and vice versa.
- Human moderators have a high level of cognitive intelligence that AI systems lack.
- Moreover, humans can identify satire or hidden interpretations in conversations, which AI fails to detect.
This explains why you’d need human moderators despite deploying the smart systems.
The fact of the matter is that human moderators find their job much simpler with AI to take care of bulk user-generated content. They channel their discretion to decide and make the final call regarding moderation.
Brands need to spark valuable conversations and discussions in online communities, and to successfully pull this off, human involvement and moderation is necessary. They can foster better interactions more accurately throughout the course of the conversation, and the AI-backed system can automatically kick in when a user violates the community guidelines or posts something objectionable.
Therefore, AI-based content moderation systems carry out the role of conducting preliminary screening. Afterwards, inappropriate content as deemed by the system is scrutinized by human moderators. This combined effort from man and machines hold the secret of successful content moderation for businesses.
Endnote
AI content moderation technologies will not completely replace human moderators any time soon. However, forward-thinking brands are already deploying intelligent systems in their chatbots and online communities. This approach ensures that machines can weed out or flag most of the harmful user-generated content.
In case you are yet to integrate this sophisticated content moderation system, make sure to consult experts like Viafoura. While still being supported by human moderators, intelligent AI systems can easily weed out spams, threats, bullies, or obscene texts that might otherwise tarnish your brand image.
