Reddit is using AI to ban users.
Reddit is using AI to ban users.
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Reddit isn't one to let understanding their own site get in the way of money making opportunities.
Based on…basically all of their actions ever…I don’t think they actually understand their own site at all.
They foster community, sometimes they’re the only ones posting content, and they try and negotiate with the users to calm them down.
This. So much this. I'd say that, if more than 20% of your moderative actions are removing content and/or banning users, you're either power-tripping or fucking lazy. Because most of the time you should be doing the things that you mentioned - talking with the users, posting and commenting, so goes on.
Honestly, this can not be worse than some of the moderators.
I can't wait for it to ban the admins and nuke the shit subreddits that should have been shut own ages ago.
As long as the AI is capable enough, I don't see what's wrong with it, and I understand if Reddit decides to utilize AI for financial reasons. Though I don't know how capable the AI is, and it is certainly not perfect, but AI is a technology and it will improve over time. If a job can be automated, I don't see why it should not be automated.
AI is often only trained on neurotypical cishet white men. What happens when a community of colour is full of people who don't have the same conversational norms as white people, and the bot thinks they're harassing each other? What happens when a neurodivergent community talk to each other in a neurodivergent way? Autistic people often get called "robotic", will the AI feel the same way and ban them as bots? What happens when an AI is used to moderate a trans community, and flags everything as NSFW because its training data says "transgender" is a porn category?
I think it's a bold assumption to think that AI is often only trained by neurotypical cishet white men, though it is a possibility. I do not fully understand how AI works and how the company trains their AI so I cannot comment any further. I admit AI has its downsides, but AI also has its upsides, same as humans. Reddit is free to utilize AI to moderate subreddits, and users are free to complain or leave reddit if they deem that their AI is more harmful than helpful.
AI is often only trained on neurotypical cishet white men.
Can you back up this claim? Unless you're just being an assumer, or you expect people to be suckers/gullible/"chrust" you.
What happens when a community of colour is full of people who don’t have the same conversational norms as white people
In this statement alone, there are not one but two instances of a racist discourse:
- Conflating culture (conversational norms) with race.
- Singling out "white people", but lumping together the others under the same label ("people of colour").
You are being racist. What you're saying there boils down to "those brown people act in weird ways because they're brown". Don't.
What happens when a neurodivergent community talk to each other in a neurodivergent way? Autistic people often get called “robotic”, will the AI feel the same way and ban them as bots?
The reason why autists are often called "robotic" has to do with voice prosody. It does not apply to text.
And the very claim that you're making - that autists would write in a way that an "AI" would confuse them with bots - sounds, frankly, dehumanising and insulting towards them. And reinforcing the stereotype that they're robotic.
[From another comment] Did you write your comment with chatgpt?
Passive aggressively attacking the other poster won't help.
Odds are that you're full of good intentions writing the above, but frankly? Go pave hell back in Reddit, you're being racist and dehumanising.
The problem is the perverse incentives for “service”. Yes, ideally things that can be automated, should be. But what about when it’s insufficient, or can’t satisfy the customer, or is just worse service. Those cases will always exist, but will the companies provide an alternative?
We’re all familiar with voice menus and chatbots to provide customer service, and there are many cases where those provide service faster and cheaper than a human could. However what we remember is how useless they were that one time, and how much effort it was to escape that hell to talk to someone who can actually help.
If this AI is just better language recognition, or if it makes me type complete sentences, just to point me to the same useless FAQ yet again, I’ll scream
As long as the AI is capable enough
The model-based decision making is likely not capable enough. Specially not for the way that Reddit Inc. would likely use it - leaving it in charge of removing users and content assumed to be problematic, instead of flagging them for manual review.
I'm specially sceptic on the claim in the site that their Hive Moderation has "human-level accuracy". Specially over time - as people are damn smart when it comes to circumventing automated moderation. Also let us not forget that the human accuracy varies quite a bit, and you definitively don't want average accuracy, you want good accuracy.
Regarding the talk about biases, from another comment: models are prone to amplify biases, not just reproduce them. As such the model doesn't even need to be trained only in a certain cohort to be biased.
Automated spam detection has been around for decades. As trolls and spammers get more sophisticated, the technology to combat them will continue to evolve. I don't see any new situation to be surprised or concerned about. Of course any kind of content moderation system can be implemented poorly, but that's a different claim.
Is anyone surprised? I’d bet they are using ai powered bots to increase engagement and repost content.
Sacrifice it all for that incompetently inept incoming IPO.
As horrible as that seems, at least the AI might be impartial and non-partisan when it comes to levying bans, unlike Reddit admins who will ban you even if you didn't break any rules at all, as long as they disagree with your opinion.
My ten year old account was banned with no appeal for "report abuse". I literally reported once, a post that was not marked nsfw with images of dead children. Go figure.
same for reporting astroturfing. I reported nsfl posts landing the front page in the past, they were not removed (that does not break reddit's rules, lol)
r/popcorn?
Reddit mods are one of the few “jobs” that I’m perfectly fine with AI replacing. There’s absolutely no way AI could do a worse job than what’s already being done.
AI: you've been banned for violating rule 1
User: but i did not violating rule 1, i violating rule 34
AI: my mistake. You've been banned for violating rule 34
User: but there's no rule 34
AI: my mistake. You've been unbanned.
You say jobs… the mods aren’t paid.
That’s why it’s in quotations
There’s absolutely no way AI could do a worse job than what’s already being done.
I see that naive techno-optimism is alive and well in this day and age.
The AI can be trained however they want, and has no conscience. Mods might actually reach a whistleblowing tipping point.