Everything in Moderation: Pros & Cons of AI and Human Moderation

Like most thinks in life there are advantages and disadvantages to almost everything. This includes AI and human moderation.

Human moderation

Pros:

There are many advantages to human moderation such as:

• Contextual understanding.

• Subjective judgement

• Content moderators have a stronger cultural awareness are better equipped to review material effectively. What may be deemed appropriate in one region, country, or user group may not hold true in another.

•  Adaptability to evolving trends.

• Empathy and compassion

• Flexibility in rule interpretation

• Crisis management

Cons:

• Moderating content cause mental health side effects as one must review illegal and harmful contents regularly.

• Scaling can be an issue.

• Certain sites have a humongous amount of content being uploaded every minute. This can be inefficient with only human moderators.

• Can come at a great cost for platforms.

• Resource intensive

• Potential for bias

• Response time and coverage

• May lack cultural competence

AI moderation

Pros:

• Efficiency

• Scalability

•  24-7 availability

• Reduces the strain on human moderators.

• Filters out spam

• Can automatically filter and flag content.

• Offers support to human moderators by improving the pre-moderation process.

• Cost effective.

• Adaptability and continuous improvement

Cons:

• Over-censorship. AI algorithms can be overzealous in their content moderation.

• False positives and negatives. AI systems may struggle to accurately distinguish between harmful and harmless content.

• Bias. AI models can inherit biases present in training data, leading to discriminatory outcomes.

• Adaptability issues. AI models might struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving trends, slang or cultural nuances.

• Lack of context understanding.

• Resource intensive.

In sum, it is evident that there are pros and cons to both human and AI moderation. That is why most online platforms use a combination of the two. That being said one should expect to see an increase on reliance on AI moderation especially as the models become more advanced and integrated into our society. For instance, the work we are doing at Orthus centres heavily around improving the quality of AI classifiers to understand various types of content, particularly, when it comes to things such as hate speech, violence and CSAM all of which we have market leading classifiers in.