I understand why the knee jerk reaction is to fear the combination of the words "AI" and "moderation." The fear is not unfounded. Reddit is already using AI to censor people more efficiently. And to be honest, AI is pretty useful for the censorship advocates.

I never feared wire tapping because I realized the government couldn't possibly employ enough people to listen to the conversations of hundreds of millions of people. Well, AI changed that. In theory, it is possible to process and assess enormous quantities of information, relatively quickly with AI... which makes it easy to find and suppress politically dissident information. Thus AI presents a massive danger in regressing human rights.

But there's a flip side. You know how the Terminator was sent back in time to save humanity? The Terminator himself was a machine designed to destroy humanity, but humans figured out a way to turn him to their side. It's not that much different with this new AI technology. Sure, it could destroy us, but it can also be our salvation.

With AI moderation, you vastly reduce the number of people that need to be trusted with running a free speech platform. With human moderation (aka Reddit), there are thousands of volunteer mods. Each bring with them their own fallibilities and petty biases. Even worse, there's evidence to suggest some of them might be colluding to control narratives. After all, human beings are corruptible. Machines, on the other hand, simply do what you tell them to do. They have no biases because they have no will, no perspective of their own. And if you are able to train them to do what is right - why shouldn't they be able to replace moderators?

All technologies can be used for good or bad purposes. It's no different with AI. Imagine for a moment we used AI responsibly, to achieve a higher degree of impartiality in moderation of online discourse. I'm not saying it will be easy, or that there aren't complications to figure out along the way, or that it will all just work right out of the box... I'm only saying it's possible. That's why I created Azodu.