Nudity moderation involves identifying and removing gore, drugs, violence, explicit nudity or suggestive nudity from online communities. It is important to protect innocent users and prevent online harm.
The best NSFW image moderation APIs measure their performance along metrics such as Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F1. These are key to not hindering freedom of speech while enforcing strict rules.
Human moderation
Human moderation is necessary to ensure that user-generated content (UGC) doesn’t contain inappropriate, offensive or illegal content. It also protects a company’s reputation and brand integrity. Moreover, it prevents toxic content from spilling offline and causing real-world issues such as cyberbullying, doxxing or stalking.
While AI can be very effective at catching certain images, it is less adept at discerning nuance. For example, a nude image of Janet Jackson’s bare chest might shock Americans while it may not surprise a Spanish, Greek or French viewer. Likewise, it can be difficult for AI to discern between lewd content that should be removed and historical or artistic content that should remain intact.
Moreover, humans have a better grasp of language subtleties such as slang and context, which can help to reduce the level of content penalization. However, it is costly to recruit, train and retain a team of human moderators at scale. Moreover, it can take months for human moderators to review the same number of images that an AI can process in minutes.
AI moderation
Many of the major social media platforms have been under pressure to develop software that can identify pornography, hate speech, threats, and other harmful content faster and more accurately than human moderators. These systems have a hard time understanding context, though. For example, language recognition AI can be fooled by sarcasm or irony, and image recognition AI has trouble with nude imagery or violent images.
To mitigate these risks, many companies offer a variety of moderation AI solutions. Eden AI, for instance, offers a simple API that can be integrated into any web application for text and image moderation. The APIs vary in terms of performance, with some performing better at identifying NSFW content than others. A good metric for comparing these services is precision, which measures the percentage of NSFW images correctly identified as NSFW. Webpurify, for instance, reports a precision rate of 94%.
Automated moderation
As UGC grows in volume, implementing automated moderation is a great way to increase efficiency and keep pace with user demands. However, the goal of automated moderation should be to supplement human moderators rather than replace them. This helps businesses maintain brand integrity and boost user security by removing harmful content in real-time.
Automated moderation also offers greater scalability than manual moderation, which is especially helpful in large online communities and forums. This helps reduce the strain on human moderators, which can cause psychological stress. It also makes it easier to monitor and remove NSFW images, which are often overlooked by manual moderation processes.
To test image moderation, click Upload a Sample Image or navigate to the Image Moderation feature page in Catalyst. This will open a box where you can choose a sample image and view the response bars. The API will then scan the image for the selected criteria and display the probability of detection as a percentage. Supported visual moderation classes include nudity, racy content, gore, drugs, weapons, and hate imagery.
Proactive moderation
With widespread internet access, users are exposed to inappropriate content online that can cause emotional distress or even physical harm. This type of content is often illegal and can be difficult to report. Proactive moderation is an effective method for preventing harmful content from being published, and can be used by human moderators or automated tools.
While the reactive paradigm of taking action against already-posted antisocial content is the most common form of moderation, proactive moderation can be more efficient. It involves screening texts, images, and videos before they are published. This method can be used to identify and remove nudity, copyright infringement, or other forms of abusive content.
The microblogging platform Koo has implemented proactive moderation features that are able to detect and block sexually explicit content, as well as hide or mark toxic comments and hate speech in less than 10 seconds. This approach is aimed at promoting user safety and improving the overall quality of the community.