The enormity of the task is simply beyond human labor, especially fora platform that hashistorically struggledto become profitable.
Deep learning could help take most of the burden of finding NSFW content off the shoulder of human moderators.
The process is known as supervised learning and is currently the most popular way of doing deep learning.
Basically, neural networks classify data based on their similarities with examples they have trained on.
This means that the AI that will be flagging adult content will have to solve two different problems.
First, it must determine whether a content contains real-life imagery and contains human genitals or female-presenting nipples.
Theoretically, the first problem can be solved with basic deep learning training.
and your neural data pipe will be able to flag new images of nudes.
But the task becomes problematic when you add exceptions.
In that case, classification will require more than just comparison of pixels and seeking visual similarities.
The algorithm that makes the moderation will have to understand the context of the image.
Some will argue that throwing more data will solve the problem.
Logically, the neural data pipe will decide that breastfeeding pictures include a human infant.
But then users will be able to game the system.
That is a trick that would never work on a human moderator.
But for a deep learning algorithm that simply examines the appearance of images, it can happen very often.
The moderation of illustrations, paintings and sculptures is even harder.
But how will it be able to tell the difference between nude art and pornographic content?
Again, that would be a task that would be super-easy for a human moderator.
But after a widespread media backlash, Facebook was forced to restore the picture.
What is the extent of deep learnings abilities in moderating content?
Tumblr acknowledged that there will be mistakes, and it will figure out how to solve them.
But humans will stay in the loop.
This threadby Tarleton Gillespie provides a fair account of what probably went wrong and how Tumblr will fix it.
Today, Tumblr is tagging the kinds of adult content that will be soon prohibited, after Dec 17.
And Tumblr users are posting images that are apparently#TooSexyforTumblr, though clearly not.
Patent drawings; raw chicken; vomiting horses; women smoking, puppies, Joe Biden.
The more challenging fields of automated moderation are those where understanding context and meaning play a more important role.
Those are the kinds of tasks that will require more human effort.
Content moderation is one of them.
