Discord plans to encourage user interactions and facilitate content moderation through new features powered by artificial intelligence.
AI is all the rage in 2023, from enhanced search engines to chatbots or art creation, and Discord is ramping-up the hype with some fun tools that may be useful for many users.
“More than 30 million people already use AI apps on Discord every month,” said Anjney Midha, Discord VP of Platform Ecosystem, adding that “almost 3 million Discord servers include an AI experience, ranging from generating gaming assets to groups writing novels with AI.”
Midjourney is one of the most popular examples, a text-to-image AI bot rocking in excess of 13 million users, creating over a billion unique images through AI.
Building on those foundations, Discord will soon be launching a selection of free public experiments in a limited number of servers: Clyde, AutoMod AI, Conversation Summaries, and Avatar Remix.
Clyde
Clyde is a chatbot soon to become powered by OpenAI technology, capable of answering questions and having extended conversations with users. Clyde can chat with you, recommend playlists, or access GIFs/emojis. To summon it, just type @Clyde in a server.
AutoMod AI
‘AutoMod AI’ is an evolution of ‘AutoMod’ introduced last year to help server moderators work efficiently. Since then AutoMod is said to have blocked more than 45 million unwanted messages from servers, reducing the burden of manual moderation.
And now with a boost from AI and its language models, the bot claims to be even better at detecting and alerting moderators whenever server rules may have been broken, thanks to its capacity of keeping in ‘mind’ the context of a conversation. The AutoMod AI experiment begins in a limited number of servers starting today.
This feature will most likely be the most useful of the bunch, allowing moderators to check flagged messages without having to be on the lookout for bad actors 24/7.
Conversation Summaries
As its name implies, this one’s job is to summarise a conversation for someone who joined late and has no clue about what’s going on. We’ve all been there.
The idea is to condense all chat messages into a short form that includes all the important bits to bring the user up to date. Useful, though those who use Discord mainly through voice may not see any immediate benefit.
This one should become available starting next week on a limited number of servers. Enabling it will be possible via the server settings.
Avatar Remix
A simpler tool, Avatar Remix allows members to spice-up each others’ avatars using AI powers. For example, we can ask it to add a birthday hat to someone’s avatar or change the background, we can also add animals or objects. The possibilities are endless. Note, before you start hatching a plan; the avatar of the original user in question doesn’t change automatically, so there is no risk of abuse.
Finally, Discord is planning for more features like a much-requested whiteboard allowing friends and colleagues to further improve their collaboration efforts.
Discord has moved from a basic gamer voice chat to a professional communication tool all while keeping its appeal, and as the firm attempts to continue building on pandemic-fuelled growth, we’re intrigued to see what else is in store.
