What is AI content moderation and how does it benefit businesses?

User-generated content is crucial to many online platforms today. Whether it is in the form of social media posts, reviews, fan material, or comments, empowering your users to have their say and express themselves can elevate your brand, making it seem relatable and authentic as well as attracting even more users.

While it’s never been easier to support user-generated content and offer a social platform to your community, it does come with challenges. Hundreds of thousands of posts, images, and videos are uploaded to social media platforms every minute. How do you make sure that all the content associated with your brand is appropriate?

For marketers, community managers, and other professionals responsible for managing a brand’s image, moderating a large amount of comments, posts, and reviews can be a significant challenge.

This is where AI content moderation comes in. With the power of AI, marketers can now manage all this user-generated content without it becoming overwhelming. Let’s explore it in more detail and how you can get started with AI content moderation today.

At its core, AI content moderation refers to the use of artificial intelligence to monitor, review, and manage user-generated content across various platforms.

We’re big fans of AI here at Smartcat—it’s at the heart of what we do. Trusted by 25% of Fortune 500 companies, the Smartcat platform leverages cutting-edge AI-human workflows for innovative products like:

Smartcat AI Translator

• Our AI translation tool can accurately translate text from and to 280 languages in seconds, learning from user preferences and specifications to create localized content that matches the desired tone of your brand. AI also helps out in the editorial phase of translation projects, quickly matching clients with the best human language experts for the job at hand in the Smartcat Marketplace.

Smartcat AI Content Generator

• Before AI translation comes AI content creation: Smartcat can also create high-quality, unique AI writing in multiple languages using your company’s assets. Drawing from your previous content, it generates any type of content that you can think of, including product copy, emails, blog articles, white papers, and more with unprecedented speed and quality, staying true to your brand’s voice and unique value proposition.

Smartcat GenAI Learning Content

• Our latest, most advanced tool is geared towards generating content for company learning and development courses. Smartcat AI analyzes your company content, mission, and values to create learning materials (text, images, video, quizzes, etc.) in different languages that are aligned with your goals and brand voice, ensuring consistency and understanding across multinational teams.

As you can see, one of AI's great advantages is its ability to analyze vast amounts of content and generate new material that matches the tone and goal of the source material. This is part of what makes AI a valuable tool for content generation—it can scan the vast amount of user-generated content and monitor it for anything inappropriate much faster than a human can.

Using AI content moderation can help ensure that all user-generated content aligns with community guidelines, legal requirements, and your brand’s standards. Let’s explore exactly how it works and how it can transform your business.

AI content moderation tools employ machine learning (ML) algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze text, images, and videos.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of the process:

• Data collection: AI systems gather and store user-generated content from your platforms.

• Analysis: The content is analyzed using NLP to understand the context, sentiment, and potential issues such as hate speech, spam, or inappropriate material.

• Decision making: Based on predefined rules and continuous learning, the AI decides whether to approve, flag, or reject the content.

• Human review (if needed): In ambiguous cases, the content is flagged for human moderators to review, ensuring accuracy and context understanding.

At first, human review will be more necessary, as it is a crucial part of how the AI learns to understand your preferences and eventually make accurate judgments itself, in line with your brand preferences. As the AI develops, it will gradually improve at automated content moderation until human review is only necessary for the most complex of cases.

Pre-moderation is when the AI reviews content before it’s published. This prevents harmful content from reaching users but can delay publication. So, it’s normally unsuitable for real-time platforms.

With post-moderation your content can go live immediately and AI–human moderation takes place after publication. This is faster for users, but you run the risk of harmful content being temporarily visible.

If you use reactive moderation, then you rely on your users to flag inappropriate content and only moderate what they report. This might work if you have a lot of user interaction and the consequences of inappropriate content getting published aren’t severe for your enterprise.

Proactive moderation is when you use AI to detect and remove harmful content that’s been published before users report it. This way you can anticipate problems and work to make your platform safer in real-time.

Hybrid moderation is when you have AI and humans working together to moderate your content. This balances speed, accuracy, and contextual understanding to improve your moderation quality, particularly if your user-generated content may contain complex nuances.

1. Efficiency and Speed

One of the most significant advantages of AI content moderation is its speed. AI can process and analyze massive volumes of content in real time, which is something that human moderators simply can’t match. This means inappropriate content is flagged or removed almost immediately, protecting your brand’s reputation and ensuring a positive user experience.

2. Cost-Effectiveness

Hiring a team of human moderators can be costly. Depending on the size of your company and community, even a large, extensive funded and well-trained team still might not even be able to keep up with the pace of content uploads. AI content moderation reduces the need for a large moderation team, cutting down on labor costs. Plus, AI doesn’t take breaks, get tired, or need vacations, providing round-the-clock moderation.

3. Consistency

Humans can be inconsistent, especially when handling subjective matters. What one human moderator deems acceptable may be flagged by a different moderator on another occasion. This can seem unfair and frustrating for users. AI ensures a consistent application of your moderation guidelines across all content. Consistency helps build trust with your audience as they see fair and equal treatment of all user-generated content.

4. Scalability

As your business grows, so does the volume of user-generated content. AI content moderation scales effortlessly with your business, handling increased loads without compromising on performance.

5. Enhanced Security

AI can detect and prevent various types of harmful content, such as phishing links, malware, and scams, enhancing the security of your online platforms.

6. Emotional Well-Being

The risk of encountering shocking, hateful, or offensive material is an unfortunate reality of content management that affects even the most sophisticated platforms. AI can swiftly quash such content without exposing it to human users or reviewers.

Improving user experience

• By swiftly removing offensive or inappropriate content, AI content moderation creates a safer and more enjoyable environment for your users. Happy users are more likely to engage with your content, leave positive reviews, and recommend your brand to others.

Protecting your brand

• Your brand’s reputation is paramount. Negative content, if left unchecked, can damage your brand’s image. AI content moderation ensures that harmful content is dealt with quickly, preserving your brand’s integrity.

Boosting engagement

• When users know that your platform is well-moderated, they are more likely to participate actively. Increased user engagement can lead to more valuable user-generated content, driving more traffic to your site and improving your SEO.

Freeing up resources

• With AI handling the bulk of moderation tasks, your team can focus on more strategic initiatives. Imagine the creative campaigns you could launch or the deep-dive analytics you could perform with the time saved!

Employee satisfaction

• From an employee’s perspective, content moderation can often be tedious and repetitive, to say nothing of the risk of encountering potentially traumatizing material. You’ve made the effort to attract promising talent to your company—direct them to more satisfying work and let AI take care of the drudgery.

Now that you know the benefits, let’s discuss how Smartcat can help you seamlessly implement AI content moderation.

• Multilingual expertise: For brands with a global reach or ambitions to expand, the challenges of content moderation multiply with every new language. Rather than hire and train a whole new team of content moderators for every market, you can integrate Smartcat AI into your content moderation workflows to handle multilingual tasks in a fraction of the time and quickly source human language expert reviewers if required.

• Training materials: Smartcat GenAI Learning Content is designed to streamline the process of training enterprise teams for all kinds of workplace learning outcomes, using AI for the speedy, high-quality creation of courses and additional training materials that are consistent with your brand, no matter the language. And yes, you can use GenAI to train your moderators on how to use AI!

1. Assess your needs

Before diving into AI content moderation, assess your specific needs. What type of content do you receive the most? What are your current moderation challenges? Understanding these will help you tailor the AI solution to your requirements.

2. Choose the right tools

Select the right tools that integrate well with your existing systems. Different packages for off-the-shelf AI content moderation are available, with some specializing in handling different types of content. Research your options for the solution that suits you best, or invest in a custom software development.

Popular providers of AI content moderation software include:

• Microsoft Azure

• Sightengine

• Nyckel

• Imagga

• Hive Moderation

3. Train your AI

AI is only as good as the data that it’s trained on. Provide your AI with a rich dataset that includes your brand’s guidelines and examples of appropriate and inappropriate content. This will help the AI learn and improve over time.

4. Monitor and adjust

AI content moderation is not a set-and-forget solution. Regularly monitor its performance and make adjustments as needed. Use feedback from your human moderators to refine the AI’s understanding and decision-making processes.

5. Educate your team

Ensure your team understands how to work with AI moderation tools. Provide training and resources to keep everyone up to date on the latest features and best practices.

AI content moderation is evolving rapidly. Future advancements may include even more sophisticated NLP capabilities, better contextual understanding, and improved integration with various content platforms. As an example, Smartcat AI already integrates with a wide range of popular tools and platforms for content creation, ensuring that you can benefit from AI assistance no matter what kind of files you are working with.

As AI continues to learn and grow, its ability to manage content will become even more nuanced and effective. For users, this means that they can feel safe from harassment, scams, or other harmful content online. For marketing professionals, this means more time to focus on creative strategies and less time spent manually managing content to safeguard the brand’s image.

The future is bright for AI content moderation, and businesses that adopt this technology can use it to optimize their user-generated content performance and future-proof themselves to be open and prepared for the coming changes in AI. Embrace the future of content moderation today and watch your business thrive!