Discord brings AI to life in its social messaging app

Voice, video and instant messaging app Discord Inc. brought the power of artificial intelligence to bear today with a number of new experimental updates that will change the way that users on its platform socialize.

These updates include bringing its chat robot, Clyde, to life through artificial intelligence, enhancing the server’s automatic moderation service and allowing users to view summaries of past conversations.

Discord is already a go-to destination for AI experiences through third-party apps. More than 30 million people have used an AI-enabled app through Discord. They include the AI art generator Midjourney, which has one of the largest servers on Discord, with more than 13 million users.

“On Discord, you can use AI to supercharge your conversation with friends – you can brainstorm together, create together, make memes together,” said Anjney Midha, Discord’s vice president of platform ecosystem. “It’s both entertainment and utility, fun and informative.”

The company teamed up with OpenAI LLC, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, to power its new AI tools. ChatGPT uses what is called generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can hold conversations, do research and even offer suggestions.

Discord added that technology to Clyde, the helpful bot and part-time logo, that pops up to deliver information or when users run into an error. Next week, Clyde is going to become a lot more helpful than ever and act almost like another person in the chat.

By typing “@Clyde” in a server with this new AI update activated, users will be able to talk to the new Clyde in any channel. He will reply to them just like another user on any number of topics including offering suggestions on where to go out to eat, what movies to watch or who the lead star is in that TV show that everyone likes (because you’re too lazy to open Google).

Clyde also has access to animated GIFs and emojis just like any other user and will use them when asked.

AutoMod also got a significant upgrade with AI capabilities. This feature was introduced last year to help take the burden off server moderators by giving them a way to automatically flag and block potentially harmful speech happening in their channels so that they could take appropriate actions. However, it operates using keywords and key phrases, which can lack nuance and context.

With the power of OpenAI’s technology, AutoMod can read the server’s posted rules and apply them to messages as they come in and understand the context of what people say instead of just using keywords. This could be the difference between flagging a user who said, “I hate parrots, they should die,” and another asking, “What are common ways parrots die so I can stop that from happening?”

The AutoMod AI is capable of translating other languages to determine if what the user said violates the rules in order to flag it for moderators. This is something that the original AutoMod would not have been capable of because it would have needed to use keywords rigidly to detect potentially harmful or rule-breaking content.

New AI-generated conversation summaries will help users catch up with rapidly flowing chats that they’ve been away from for a while. These summaries will bundle together topics and provide short descriptions of what was discussed, along with icons of who was participating in them. Users can then click on them to jump to the context and read along.

It’s not uncommon for servers with a lot of people, or even with only a few but very chatty friends, to have multiple topics pass by over a period of time. This way, upon returning, they can jump back into the flow or understand what people might have talked about without feeling completely out of the loop.

As for features on the horizon, the Discord team is working on a collaborative whiteboard with an AI twist. Users will be able to jump into a session together and draw on a whiteboard and then select a region, type text to describe what they want and have a text-to-image generator take what they drew and create visuals.

Focused on bringing the best that AI has to offer to its community and developers, Discord also launched an AI Incubator as part of its $5 million ecosystem fund that it announced in October. The new incubator will offer cash grants to support the development of further AI tools for Discord as well as office hours for development teams, cloud compute credits for services and early access to Discord platform features.

Images: Discord