We must not forget that AI — especially the AI of computer vision, linguistics, and natural language processing — is indispensable today in terms of the safety and compliance of digital platforms for Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content moderation. While there are major improvements, technical limitations on these systems present challenges that may impair their effectiveness. This piece takes a deeper dive into the main technical issues of current NSFW AI models and how these present issues and impact content moderation.
Issues with a contextual understanding
Among the most significant challenges to NSFW AI is the lack of context-awareness. It is difficult to tell apart harmful or explicit content from educational, artistic or medical content, as the case may be, but ordinary citizens have neither the time nor the skill to differentiate. This lack of nuance in understanding might also lead to inaccuracy in flagging it for filters, impacting those who create content and research. For instance, AI system flagged an educational sexual health content videos as inappropriate, with error rates of up to 20% in some cases.
Accuracy and False Positives
NSFW AI systems, while better, are not without faults in the accuracy of spotting explicit content. This can lead to alarming results called false positives, where the algorithm will mark benign (sfw) content as NSFW and it will be mistakenly censored. Current AI models — assuming decent complexity of the content and specificity of the training data — apparently tend to achieve an average false positive rate of 5% to 15%.
LIMITATIONS OF REAL TIME PROCESSING
This next day moderation is essential, especially on live interaction platforms. Today's NSFW AI systems face significant challenges in the need for real-time capabilities to process momentous amounts of data or video streams. That lag, in turn, can let bad content slip through for a period, letting viewers see damaging material. The delay is reported to be around 2-5 seconds, which is too much if you are trying to showcase your work live.
Changing Standards and Slang
NSFW, along with the language corresponding to it changes all the time. This is a nontrivial technical challenge because AI systems need to be ready to learn and adapt to new paradigms, slang, and cultural phenomena. These systems must be continuously updated with fresh data, a laborious and time-consuming task. This is another reason quick turnaround for updates is critical — if updates are not pushed out quickly then we end up with gaps in moderation where new flavours of NSFW content are allowed to proliferate before they are correctly identified.
Bias and Fairness Issues
Bias is a well-documented issue for AI systems, and it is no different when it comes to NSFW-content moderation. Biased data can make AI biased, so the software might be more likely to lash out at people in certain demographics or at certain cultural expressions without cause if the training data is not representative or balanced. Addressing these biases is difficult as it requires that we know they exist and that we take steps toward retraining our models, but this is easier said than done.
Nonetheless, despite these challenges, nsfw character ai systems are receiving constant improvements to overcome some of these issues. Developers are working on improving contextual knowledge, false positives, real-time processing speed, new content trends and no bias. After the recent round of updates, safer and more inclusive online spaces are the way forward.