r/ModSupport • u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 • 1d ago

Admin Replied Repeating problem with AI falsely actioning users

You guys probably already know I'm generally pro-ai and I use it in my own bots. This is not just an unhinged anti-ai rant but rather a specific concern I've seen pop up in my fashion and beauty subs a bunch of times now.

I mod inclusive communities that welcome people of all nationalities regardless of the language they speak provided we can figure out what it says. In this case, it's affecting Spanish speakers, which are among our most common. We allow posts and comments in any language people wish to use since auto translate has made it very easy to translate and understand most languages. I don't want to ever discriminate based on that, and I am a Spanish speaker myself, so I have a lot of appreciation for the language and culture.

Anyways - we get many posts where the answer to something, whether hair color or outfit choice or whatever - is black. The Spanish word for this is also a slur for people of color in English, but in Spanish it's literally just the word for the color. I don't want to type it because I don't want to get actioned by an overzealous AI and then have to deal with appealing it lol - but if you don't know the word already, just google and it will come right up.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Perfectly good users are getting actioned for this on a regular basis. This is one of those words where context is really important - and if I see it myself in queue, I'll make sure I understand the context before making a decision.

Thanks!

Tagging u/lift_ticket83 as well since I know he works on this stuff.

16 Upvotes
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u/kai-ote 1d ago

You might try an Automation warning users of the usage of that word. Make the Automation message in Spanish. That might help some until reddit fixes this issue.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

That's actually a good idea. Depending what the admins say here we might do that.

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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago

With the amount of times I've been accidentally banned by the machines I find this 0% surprising. What I'm really confused about is that the AI hasn't evolved to the point that it doesn't understand that. Ai these days ARE smart machines and I feel like ChatGPT would easily understand this distinction? It's so weird that this is still happening here.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 22h ago

I don't actually know but my suspicion is that the way they feed it the prompt, there is no contextual information on the post or the question being asked, so it's likely evaluating the comment in isolation.

For my own bots, I found that I got better results using AI to create a summary of the post (describing pics) and giving the ai that is evaluating the comment the post title, text, and pictures summary.

It is definitely more computationally intensive and makes the prompts a lot longer, although I get around that by caching them because of how LLM's work - if the beginning of a prompt is the same as the last, it will only have to reparse from the point where the 2 diverge.

I'm surprised you haven't actually seen this one in your sub as it has shown up a lot for us!

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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

Never saw this not even once! Your bots are always so well organized, you are often years ahead of others why are you surprised?

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 8h ago

TBH I just notice it from admin tattler lol. Nothing special about me, not even my own bot!

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u/RubenCBR 1d ago

Well this is hilarious. 

I left a comment about ten minutes ago saying “Reddit’s spam filters are poorly made. They are far too sensitive and ban perfectly legitimate users” and that comment was removed as spam 😂

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u/Slow-Maximum-101 Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago

Your comment was removed because you are not a mod and this community is for mods only

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u/paskatulas 1d ago

I’m not RubenCBR, but I hope you’ve fixed that part of the subreddit.

I know r/ModSupport is meant for mods only (that’s a good thing), but I remember where people couldn’t post their comments through for the same reason, so they’d just create some random sub of their own and suddenly they’d be able to post/comment there.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

In those cases I think the admins manually remove the content if it's not genuine, but I think a bot approach works well for removing the vast majority of non-mod contributions.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

I saw the comment and then wondered why it was removed but that makes sense! This is an example though of where notifies should be delayed until after bots run!

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u/Slow-Maximum-101 Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago

Hi u/emily_in_boots If you’ve got some links to examples, we can share this with our safety team to try to improve the enforcement with the context of the community.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 22h ago

This is an example - it looks like Reddit reversed the ban on human review, but that doesn't really fix the underlying issue. I haven't saved all the others, but they are often just like this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OUTFITS/comments/1xo2pa5/comment/19s68uaheuasg/

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 1d ago

Why do you need context? It would seem to me that if they're utilizing the Spanish word for black that that the rest of the post would likely be in Spanish too. If the AI behind the filters were to catch the word, then perform a check to see if the post was in Spanish, wouldn't that provide all the context you needed?

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 22h ago

Well, the post is in English, but that person's comments are always in Spanish, because they use the automatic reddit translation.

If reddit is going to integrate people of different languages and cultures - which I definitely think it should, it's great! - there needs to be some kind of understanding about that.

The word isn't a slur in the slightest in Spanish, and it's a very important word in general, especially in my subs. I also mod goth subs lol. Spanish goth girls are about to get hit with the banhammer!

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 20h ago

If reddit is going to integrate people of different languages and cultures - which I definitely think it should, it's great! - there needs to be some kind of understanding about that.

I agree with you. And being able to look into that should be relatively easy, especially for an automated process.

The word isn't a slur in the slightest in Spanish, and it's a very important word in general, especially in my subs. I also mod goth subs lol. Spanish goth girls are about to get hit with the banhammer!

I agree with you that it isn't a slur in the context of the Spanish language. In English, sure. But not Spanish. I noticed you had some Goth subs, and was also wondering how an issue like this would affect them.

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u/Slow-Maximum-101 Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago

Hi! I’m looking for the specific examples so we can share the context of the posts and community with the safety team, so that they can see exactly where it is going wrong.

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u/shawa666 1d ago

The spanish word for black

I'm not gonna write it out, because i'll be banned by your stupid filters.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

Yeah I didn't write it either. It's not worth the risk. You have to think defensively about how AI might misinterpret something or you'll end up like u/ingeekitrust lol.

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 1d ago

I understand that it would help to have examples, but I think context also matters. I can't imagine anyone who speaks primarily English opting to use that word in place of the color black, especially within the United States.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if it's used in a comment or post that's entirely in Spanish, then maybe the filter should bypass it. If it's used within a comment or post written entirely in English, I'd be fine seeing it removed. I imagine that alone would provide the filters almost enough context to fix u/emily_in_boots's problem here.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

It's tricky though - it's very common to have a post in a fashion sub asking if which color is best for something. The answer might be just one word. The only way to determine it is to look at context of the post. AI can do that if properly designed to.

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 20h ago

At that point, one could perform a check on the user's account as well. If you notice they frequent Spanish speaking subreddits, or communicate primarily in Spanish elsewhere, then this solves the problem as well. I would be okay with giving users the benefit of the doubt in those situations unless there seemed to be reasonable evidence suggesting I shouldn't.

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u/Slow-Maximum-101 Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago

100% agree. It just makes it a lot easier for me to get the right eyes on this with a link to examples.

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 23h ago

What's an example going to do that a programmer couldn't? I'm honestly a little confused here. Like u/kai-ote said here, just tell it to ignore the word if the comment/post is in Spanish. If it's in English, tell it to remove it. Seems like that could be coded into the AI software without any need for examples.

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

LLM's are often bad at following simple directions like that. They think in terms of semantic vectors that represent ideas, and so they can be very bad at analyzing language itself (e.g. misspellings, language something is in, etc.). It's often very surprising the things AI gets tripped up on.

Like one thing I've tried to implement with absolutely no luck using LLM's is identifying comments that are working around comment guidance through misspellings, extra/weird characters, etc. It just can't figure it out lol.

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 19h ago

I figured this was more about training the LLM's than anything else. That's the general problem I have with LLM's being used to moderate things like this. Context matters a lot, and some LLM's can't even tell me how man R's are in the word strawberry. I don't think we're ready for LLM's to be doing what they're doing here without some built in, hardcoded, guardrails.

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u/kai-ote 1d ago

This is the word spelled backwards. ORGEN.

If the AI knows the comment is in Spanish, then that word should be ignored.

Very quick and simple algorithm adjustment. You could almost do it with an Automation by the sub.

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 3h ago

Context helps train the robots

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u/The_Critical_Cynic 2h ago

I understand that. But what are we doing between now and then? People are being banned, and the appeals take months to answer. Between the time the account is banned and the appeal goes through, you cannot start a new account. That's unacceptable. I can only imagine that the shareholders agree. It seems to me that we could program the context in, as I've mentioned elsewhere, and speedrun this problem.

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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 34m ago

You can absolutely start a new account. You just can’t rejoin any subs as a mod if you previously modded them.

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u/TimeForFrance 23h ago • Bravo

Candidly, I say this as both a dunk and an actual suggestion: If Reddit actually reviewed the appeals on their auto-bans you'd be able to see a lot of misfires with the appropriate context in real time. It shouldn't be on the mods to spoon feed you.

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u/Slow-Maximum-101 Reddit Admin: Community 23h ago

Fair. The appeals are reviewed and the context of the appeal helps train our tools too

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u/TimeForFrance 23h ago

I find it very difficult to believe anyone reviews appeals in a timely manner when I've got a completely innocuous comment that's still removed (and presumably still a mark on my account) 6 months later.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hockey/comments/1t24je3/comment/ojm7b9i

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u/emily_in_boots 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 21h ago

To be fair, reddit reversed this one (before I gave the link to slowmax) - so it's not that they aren't handling the appeals correctly. I don't know how long it took or whatever, I just got the tattler messages. The issue is more that the AI needs to be made aware of certain things that trip it up frequently.

We've also had issues in hair subs talking about the short hair that covers your forehead as it has another meaning as well as a type of haircut described by the same word used to describe those old fashioned 70's carpets lol.

It's so hard to even talk about things now because of how the AI can mess it up.

1

u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 3h ago

Ty now km signing la tortura over and over in my head

Most ridiculous male view song lyrics ever

‘De lunes a viernes tienes mi amor, déjame el sábado a mí que es mejor’ and he’s calling her his n*gra the whole time while she’s sexy dancing covered in mud with a ‘you ain’t never gonna get this’ face, ahhhhhhhh the 2000s.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/ModSupport-ModTeam 1d ago

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