Discord, the popular communication platform for gamers, has been one of the companies that embraced artificial intelligence (AI) early on to enhance the user experience.
In fact, the company’s shift towards AI has been underway even before most big tech companies considered the huge potential of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.
For several years now, Discord has been entertaining the idea of using AI features in content moderation as well as voice chat to make its platform more engaging, secure, and user-friendly.
Discord has also been using AI through its content moderation system. Discord uses machine learning algorithms to detect and remove inappropriate or harmful content, such as hate speech, bullying, and harassment. The system also identifies and removes spam messages, allowing users to focus on meaningful conversations.
Another way Discord is using AI is through its voice and video chat features. It uses machine learning algorithms to filter out background noise, such as keyboard clicks, fan noise, and the dog barking, which can be distracting during a conversation.
As a result, more than 30 million people already use AI apps on Discord every month. Midjourney’s server, for example, is the biggest on Discord, with more than 13 million members bringing their imaginations to pixels by creating over a billion unique images through AI apps on Discord.
Fast forward a few years, and the company seems to be going all out with AI starting this year.
In a blog post on Thursday, the company announced a number of new AI features, including updates to its existing chatbot, more AI-powered moderation tools, and new ways to stay up-to-date on the millions of conversation threads the company caters to every day.
Anjney Midha, Discord’s vice president for platform ecosystem, said almost 3 million Discord servers include an AI experience, ranging from generating gaming assets to groups writing novels with AI to AI companions, AI companies, and AI-based learning communities.
As of this month, more than 10 percent of new Discord users are joining specifically to access AI-based interest-based communities.
“On Discord, you can use AI to supercharge your conversation with friends—you can brainstorm together, create together, and make memes together. It’s both entertainment and utility—fun and informative,” Midha said.
This year, the company tackles AI head-on with three new features: Clyde, AutoMod AI, and Conversation Summaries as a ‘free experiment’ on a few, limited servers. These are just some of the new features, aside from other AI enhancements the company plans to roll out in the future like Avatar Remix and a whiteboard with an AI prototype, among many other features.
Let’s further discuss each of the new features:
Clyde
The Clyde chatbot gets an AI upgrade by responding to slash commands or DMing you if you’ve made an error. And starting next week, the company executive said the feature will further improve using OpenAi’s ChatGPT technology as it becomes integrated into the platform. With this feature, the chat robot can now answer questions, recommend playlists, access GIFs and emojis, and have human-like conversations with Discord users in any channel.
“While our AI features use OpenAI technology, OpenAI may not use Discord user data to train its general models,” Midha adds. He stressed that a strict privacy policy remains enforced, with the chatbot only accessing messages sent directly to it or sent in a thread it created.
AutoMod AI
One of the early AI features introduced to the platform last year, AutoMod, helps prevent Discord users from being burdened with the burden of manually moderating a server. In a span of a year, AutoMod has automatically blocked more than 45 million unwanted messages from servers before they even had a chance to be posted based on server rules.
As an added boost to this feature, Discord will now use large language models using OpenAI technology to find and alert the moderator whenever server rules may have been broken.
Conversation Summaries
With the help of AI, Discord’s summaries will help users bundle streams of messages and segregate them into topics so that users can instantly catch up on or join in conversations that matter to them. Discord users only need to set this up by enabling the feature in the server settings.
Aside from the three new AI-powered features, Discord also plans to enhance the user experience with additional features in the future. It includes Avatar Remix, which lets users be creative with avatars using the power of generative image models. Another future experiment is a Whiteboard with an AI Preview, for which many server users have been clamoring for a long time.
Going all out on AI seems to be the mantra of Discord as it launches an AI Incubator that will be funded by the $5 million commitment it made last year when it announced the creation of its own ecosystem to encourage developers, startups, and individuals to build more AI features on Discord.
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