All You Need To Know About AI Content Moderation: A Beginner’s Guide

Digital content is everywhere, and it’s only getting more popular. With the growing demand for content, we’re also seeing more and more creators looking to publish more creative pieces. To keep readers engaged with their original content, creators are turning to AI tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Content moderation tools can help streamline and automate various processes in content moderation — from reviewing submissions to monitoring user comments.

This article covers everything you need to know about AI content moderation — from what types of moderation there are, how AI tools work, why AI is necessary, and common challenges that you’ll encounter as a new user or creator of AI software.

What types of moderation are there?

There are two primary types of moderation that you can use AI tools for. First, content moderation is reviewing incoming content to ensure that it complies with the rules and policies of a particular platform or website. The second type of moderation is user moderation, which is the other process of monitoring user-to-user comments to ensure that they comply with the platform’s rules and policies.

How AI tools work

Machine learning is the core tech behind AI content moderation. When a publisher uses a tool to automate its content moderation process, it is essentially outsourcing the work to a program that can perform that process more efficiently than a human could. “AI software leverages advanced algorithms to make decisions based on data automatically,” explains the media intelligence platform Catchpoint.

While machine learning can help AI tools become more efficient at content moderation, these tools are not “super-intelligent” in how people often think of AI. These tools’ algorithms are complex and difficult to understand, so they are unsuitable for running every aspect of a business. Instead, they are best suited for tasks humans have historically done better, like reviewing content and spotting potential violations or toxic comments.

Why AI is necessary

In a world filled with ever-growing content, it can be overwhelming to manage all the different pieces of content on your site. To ensure that visitors don’t leave your website, you must have interesting and engaging content. With so much content out there, it’s difficult for readers to find something new and interesting to read. Keeping up with the latest trends, publishing engaging and original content, and reaching an audience that is both interested and engaged is difficult.

AI tools can help content creators automate and streamline processes that would otherwise be time-consuming and laborious. By using AI tools, you can focus your time on creating engaging, original content that your audience wants to read.

Consequences of ignoring

AI tools cannot replace the importance of human oversight. It would help if you were involved at every step to ensure that these tools serve your team’s and users’ needs. The way that these tools work is to learn from user behavior and patterns. The tool will learn from the decisions that you and your team make.

Suppose you ignore machine learning in your content moderation. In that case, you end up with a system that is technically capable of handling moderation and is likely to do a better job than a human-only system. However, without training data, the system will likely make decisions based on a few examples at random and not the entire corpus of content. This can lead to many false positives, wasting time as moderators must manually correct them.

Common challenges with AI moderation

Though we understand what is content moderation and its usefulness, there are many challenges that come with using AI moderation tools. One challenge content creators face when using AI for moderation is the lack of standardization across tools. There is no standard for how to use AI tools, so different tools work in slightly different ways. Additionally, when it comes to building out your team, you’ll need to find humans that are skilled at using these tools and understand how they work. Another challenge with using AI tools for content moderation is that creators may not fully understand the types of content that their tool is handling. Some tools can detect and classify content, while others rely on humans to classify the content. However, some tools may be able to detect certain types of content while ignoring others.

Conclusion

While machine learning and artificial intelligence are great for automating and streamlining certain processes in content moderation, they are not a replacement for human oversight. AI tools are only as good as the team that is trained to use them. First, you’ll need to find skilled humans using these tools and understand how they work. This can be not easy to find, especially if you’re starting. While machine learning and artificial intelligence are great for automating and streamlining certain processes in content moderation, they are not a replacement for human oversight. AI tools are only as good as the team that is trained to use them.