I wonder what dang thinks about that for HN?

I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.

Alright, I see. Reddit is not my thing, but I can see how this gets complex (and costly) fast.

My understanding is Reddit the company actually already uses openai's moderation api[1]. Not sure they expose that to anyone (even mods) outside the company. It's not an LLM I don't think though, it's just a set of classifiers to give a probability that something violates various categories of their TOS.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation

A few-shot prompt should be able to do it. Now, I will admit I have not tried; but you could have the prompt be some posts that are considered "on topic" (of the sub) and others that are "off topic", and let the LLM rate these posts. Limit the number of new posts to a small number to prevent probing and spamming.

And handling the 11th unique story on a single topic being posted and voted up by brigades that week? Considering people's user history when making moderation judgments? Having the context to understand new dog whistles? All things that are technically possible, I guess, but it requires a lot of complex prompting, long context windows, and effort placed into moderation tools that Reddit doesn't seem to have put significant effort into before.

"You are a bad user. I am a good Bing."

This kills me, everytime.

Will the future be Star Trek or Dune as far as AI is concerned?

It would, but spez doesn't have OPEX for the GPU hours it'd require. Both for fine-tuning for per-subreddit rules, and running the model itself.

I don't see why he wouldn't. Top of the line hardware is in the tens-of-thousands of dollars. He should have the OPEX-budget to buy enough cards to distort the market.

That's going to be very costly

No. It would be able to do some of the parts of moderation everyone would find easy, none of the stuff people would find hard and would cost a lot.[1] There are AI-powered companies and tools[2] that help with moderation but nothing that can automate everything that human mods do on any site with a reasonable user community.

[1] Source: am responsible for trust and safety including the tech solution and the moderation team for a 1bil+ views site. [2] For example https://hivemoderation.com/ or https://www.openweb.com/

Don't believe me? OpenAI themselves use a special-purpose model and not an LLM for moderation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.03274

If they don't think this is a situation for an LLM, you can probably safely assume it's not.

Oh, I believe you. Thanks for the references.