Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI
Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content — with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation.
As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits.
The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed “Rules Hub,” leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog post. The company says that by introducing AI mods, it could help keep AI spam at bay.
“We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special,” the company wrote.
The word “human” certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last — and far from perfect — bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of.
Reddit hopes that its new tools will eventually be able to “replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod,” or Automoderator, an existing moderation tool that has long been a thorn in the sides of users.
Its AI mod bots will have a key advantage over Automod, if Reddit is to be believed.
“Unlike Automod’s enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” the company explained. “That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control.”
But whether these new changes will be able to fix Reddit users’ already strained relationship with mods remains unclear at best.
Reactions to the news were mixed on the platform, to say the least, with some questioning whether the company is looking to fight fire with fire.
“As someone who moderates a small regional hip hop/rap subreddit that constantly has lyrics as comments, I do not expect this to work well with that kind of content,” one user wrote. “There’s a ton of stuff I already have to fish out of the filter because it’s “violent” or whatever and it’s just a song title or lyric. I doubt AI will be able to grasp the nuance of the lyrics of someone like Lee Scott or Jam Baxter.”
It’s a particularly contentious subject as Reddit continues to be overrun by AI slop and bot spam years after trying to force AI companies to pay to access Reddit data. At the time, new API restrictions triggered an outright rebellion by users.
“Before long, Reddit will be mostly AI bot accounts, moderated by AI bots, discussing mostly AI generated slop,” one disillusioned user wrote. “I genuinely don’t know if the fun parts of the internet are going to be usable 5-10 years from now if this continues.”
More on Reddit: Reddit Intentionally Breaks Its Mobile Website, Demanding Users Download Its App Instead
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