I’m looking for ways to integrate AI into my Discourse forum to assist with moderation. I don’t need it to replace my moderators, I just need help catching things humans usually can’t see. Sometimes, it’s because these issues are literally invisible to a moderator (like a spammer who is creating multiple accounts from the same IP address). Other times, it is visible to a moderator, but it’s easy to get lazy and miss these things (like a topic that is posted in the wrong category, or a topic that is veering off course).
There are endless tasks an AI moderator could help with. Just a few ideas off the top of my head:
- Monitoring all new posts to indicate the likelihood of whether they’re spammer or legitimate users.
- Monitoring new users and their activity until they’ve reached a certain trust level.
- Catching problem users making new accounts after being suspended.
- Identifying topics that have been posted in the wrong category, and offering suggestions for which category they should be moved to.
- Flagging and immediately removing NSFW content.
- Identifying when the conversation in a topic is veering off-course or should be locked.
- Identifying when a topic has already been covered and should be redirected.
- Identifying when a user has created multiple accounts (multiple users logging in from the same IP address).
- Identifying when a user is making a self-promotional or irrelevant post.
Not to mention (and this would be going in a slightly different direction), there are times when AI could even respond to certain topics with a clearly marked AI profile. For example, if someone posts a question about how to use the forum or where to find a certain feature (like how to update their profile), the bot could respond by identifying when it’s a question it could easily answer, and then it could jump in and explain how to do it.
I’m barely even scratching the surface here, but the underlying question is: Has anyone created an AI bot that can assist with these types of moderation tasks in Discourse?
If not, what’s holding this kind of innovation back? This seems like it would be insanely useful for forum admins, not to replace humans (although that may be possible in some cases), but to help humans do the job a lot better.