Modding in the Age of AI 🧵

[u/iceeypisces]

Soooo AI is… everywhere.

It’s expanding rapidly across Reddit, tackling tasks from automated moderation to anti-spam defenses. Yet as subreddits adapt, one reality remains clear: technology cannot replace human judgment. 

In this session, mods u/imjustheretodomyjob, u/katpoker666, and u/sageninemusic discuss how AI integrates with community oversight, the opportunities and challenges it brings, and why the human touch is still indispensable.

How are you currently using AI tools in your sub? Or are you steering clear? Let’s hear your take.

[u/Fragrant_Ad_5297]

i have mixed feelings about AI honestly. i don’t use it to express myself but i have used it as a tool to help curate a really in depth orientation packet for my mods. but i did that using the information, context and guidelines i provided and just asked it to organize it. i think there’s a meaningful distinction between using AI to organize and build on your own knowledge and using it to replace your own thought or voice entirely.

in our subreddits though i’ve noticed that a lot of users seem to rely on AI to help them articulate their feelings or communicate things they might struggle to put into words themselves.

i do think there’s a legitimate conversation to be had about authenticity, overreliance and what gets lost when so much of our communication is filtered through AI. being autistic i sometimes speak pretty robotically and factually but you can always tell i am a human.

when users use it to communicate i think the context, intent and degree to which someone is relying on it matter. ripping off writing and fake photos / art is not cool, and it can never replace human moderation due to the same context issues every bot has.

[u/katpoker666 → u/Fragrant_Ad_5297]

Great point re the loss of authenticity with AI, Fragrant_Ad. That’s part of why I’m anti-AI for content creation in creative subs like r/writingprompts. As humans, we each have our own unique stories to share and voice in which we share them. We lose a lot of that nuance when we just standardize with ChatGPT or even Grammarly. Fwiw we have some fantastic writers who have autism that I know on our sub and I love reading their work. For me, it’s fascinating to try and better understand how others see the world

[u/ICC-u]

The problem is AI being used to create bots, and Reddit doing next to nothing to stop it.

I now hear old.reddit and automod are going to be shut down.

Reddit is constantly taking tools away from mods.

[u/CrasheonTotallyReal → u/ICC-u]

on an unrelated note, reddit is taking away background colors for user flairs to match mobile and "to make it easier to read"

cant they just add colored flairs for mobile instead?

[u/I_can_vouch_for_that]

We've got AI-generated photos that are used as a verification photo.

It would be nice to have some tools that mods can implement to just scan photos in general to confirm whether they're AI before allowing the post to go through.

[u/CM1112]

We don’t have much issue with AI, but also are quite strict in crowd controlling the ai post and removing if we think it’s AI, where the user can submit a modmail if we were wrong

[u/Aeroncastle]

I don't care about using AI as a moderating tool, but God knows I'm seeing 20 times as much spam and I feel like I have less tools than I did 10 years ago

I feel like all the AI advancements are going straight to the hands of spammers

[u/jgoja]

How can you have an actual conversation on AI when the entire panel is anti-AI. Reddit itself relies heavily on AI.

[u/maiyannah]

I recently redditrequested a sub recently that was absolutely overrun by spambot posting when I came in. It took a team of people several days to clean it up. It can absolutely ruin a sub if its let go unchecked. I don't begrudge people who want to allow AI content in their subs at all, I think everyone deserves their own spaces, but I do think that we could use better tools for us subs that don't want it. In particular AI image detection. We also need to cut the brigading that happens on both sides of the fence out.

[u/Sean_Campbell]

AI has unleashed a torrent of crap books on r/KindleUnlimited. Unoriginal, uninspired, with AI covers. It's a floodgates problem as obviously AI can churn these out far quicker than any human author can write.

Many authors from Reddit are also in the pool of authors who had their worked stolen and fed into the training data (including a dozen of my own books) so seeing a tool scrape your life's work to emulate it in a shoddy way is doubly-insulting.

Yes, there's nuance around using AI in non-generative ways but that's even harder to detect and mod than straight up Gemini/ Claude/ whatever spam content.

[u/Bubbly_Attention_916]

The other issue is people weaponizing the use of AI a a way to diminish a good faith contribution. Users will comment it is an opinion that the person doesn't agree with and rather than downvote users will spam that user and call their post "AI".

[u/juxtapods]

After being added to the mod team for r/wehappyfew, I introduced "no AI" to an existing "low-effort" rule. We had a couple posts using AI or conversations with GenAI, and I wanted to nip it in the bud.

Overwhelmingly positive feedback in the comments and votes from the community when the update was announced. There are true fans of the We Happy Few game who take time and effort to make fanart or tributes with their own hands, so AI has no place there.

it's unfair to the community members who work hard to share their love of the game with others, to include low-effort, junk, or spam posts, and AI is on that list.

[u/ripred3]

with

r/Arduino_AI

without

r/arduino

[u/epicSwordfish]

I use AI as a support tool, mostly filtering spam, but final moderation decisions are always human.

[u/highrisedrifter]

I moderate r/industrialmusic. We have a zero tolerance ban on AI music after we polled the sub members and they told us they are overwhelmingly against it.

[u/BabaRanchodDas-69]

well.... recently became mod, so no major posts are made.... so no major needs. But I once got false warning, which was diabolical though..

[u/diverareyouokay]

This is actually a really interesting presentation.

On an unrelated note, for some reason every time I try to add comments to the chat, I get a “message failed – unauthorized” error.

u/small-slay and u/big-slay, can you check into that error? It seems possible I’m not the only one who can’t add comments to the chat

[u/Travwolfe101]

We only use AI for auto mod removals. I run r/drugs which is a niche community but I enjoy being able to share life saving information, prevent misinformation, and generally help users. We have a code to never encourage drug use but accept it as fact and provide harm reduction

[u/Dracyl]

This panel feels more like an attempt to appease us. Like "yeah, look, let's talk about how AI is bad and awful, but we pinky promise you we're working on it and we're open to ideas."

But with Reddit getting money from AI from basically 4 out of 5 ads it gives us the impression that they don't really care as long as they're getting paid.

[u/Linuxthekid]

AI tools in moderation have proven themselves unreliable and dangerous, and it gives companies an excuse to cut out actual people they can contact in case of a problem

[u/cdm9002]

AI content is an issue, but you are treating the symptom, not the cause. Scanning/detecting AI is a cat and mouse game.

You need to validate the accounts. They need to be tied to a real human.

That doesn't mean mods or other users should find who they are, but reddit needs to do this so they can take actions against reported AI accounts.

Reddit should also provide location info to mods for users.

[u/BugBulky]

My Sub is german is aiming the beauty of nature. So animals, plants and so on. Its hard sometimes to verify usercontent as true or AI.

[u/OG-Giligadi]

I don't use ai for anything, modding or otherwise. It's poison.

[u/neuroticsmurf]

I moderate a lot of video meme subs. Over the past year or two, the amount of AI-generated videos has increased exponentially.

The Devvit tools designed to catch AI are — unfortunately — geared toward catching text posts. But for videos, there isn’t much out there.

We rely on community reports that a video submission is AI-generated in order to flag it. We then take the video and run it through an off-site AI checking source. It doesn’t catch everything, but it catches a lot of the AI videos.

I would dearly love it if a Devvit app existed to review pics and videos for AI-generated content.

[u/lithdoc]

Any bots planned to detect LLM?