Discord is using AI to improve its Clyde bot, tools, and features

Discord is now converting its current Clyde bot into a chatty chatbot utilizing OpenAI's ChatGPT technology. According to an article in Theverge.com, next week, Clyde will receive an upgrade that will enable it to respond to queries and engage in discussions with users, much like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Microsoft's Bing chat function. It's part of a larger initiative to integrate AI into Discord, which also includes the creation of chat summaries by AI and the possibility for server administrators to use AI tools.

During a public test next week with Discord alpha members on a small number of servers, the Clyde chatbot will be free for Discord users. In the future, Discord server administrators will be able to add the Clyde chatbot, enabling users to call it into chats and have it reply to requests to upload GIFs to a channel, suggest music, and much more.

Users of Discord may ask questions directly to Clyde, and the chatbot can even start new threads in channels to encourage interactions among friends. You won't be able to utilize Clyde to converse with your friends on your behalf by writing messages, unlike the ChatGPT integration in Slack. Consider it more like a chatbot that you may call when you and your pals are debating the most well-known songs, comparing the number of years it has been since Tottenham Hotspur last won a major championship, or searching for information like your friend's time zone.

Discord intends to integrate this into its chat and communities app, but there is still much testing, learning, and iteration to be done before it is ready to be made available to all users. The improved version of Clyde will first be accessible to a small group of alpha testers before the chatbot is made generally accessible, as was the case with many earlier Discord trials. The number of people or servers receiving first access was not confirmed by Discord.

Anjney Midha, who oversees Discord's platform ecology, says the company has long been focused on figuring out how to make engaging with People smarter, better, and more enjoyable. You frequently have an idea of how to do it from the standpoint of a product, but you frequently need to wait for technology to catch up to meet your expectations.

With the rise of ChatGPT and the debut of Microsoft's AI-powered Bing during the past six months, Midha and the Discord team are optimistic that massive language models have caught up to their goal. "Actually in the last 90 days, it became evident that the huge language models... the deployment base has taken up where they are now ready to have very engaging and exciting interactions with consumers and not just researchers," claims Midha.

Yet it's a dangerous wager. Currently, ChatGPT and Clyde both run on the same technology. ChatGPT has previously been proven to delude and provide incorrect information, and Microsoft's new Bing chatbot has demonstrated what happens when you introduce this cutting-edge technology to a large population: irrational and unpleasant answers. The chatbot on Discord could easily achieve the same. Discord is very aware of this and even provides a warning when you first choose to utilize Clyde.

Despite the risks associated with incorrect information, the existence of an AI-powered Discord chatbot on servers that frequently include younger and more tech-savvy users might pose some difficulties for Discord's AI goals. Many people will choose to disregard the warning and try to jailbreak the Discord chatbot to use derogatory language.

We keep an eye on what's going on with open models, and Midha says he is well aware of attempts to jailbreak them and coerce models into saying things that would be objectionable or violate terms of service. "Building with actual people is the only true method to defend against those, so we're starting slowly by releasing it to a small group of alpha testers and asking them for input that helps us to refine and optimize the models."

Furthermore, according to Midha, "no user data that is gathered or surfaced to Clyde is being utilized to train any models or enhance models by OpenAI."

Moreover, Discord is experimenting with discussion summaries created by AI. Users of Discord will be able to catch up on discussions they might have missed thanks to this opt-in experience within a server that is not enabled by default. This is especially true for Discord, where close-knit groups keep discussions flowing continuously across time zones, making it more difficult for users to keep up with discourse but simultaneously making it more crucial.

With an improvement to AutoMod, the potential of AI for Discord administrators might become exciting. Discord is testing an AI-powered version of its autonomous moderation tool, which it widely distributed last year to combat spam and insults.

Discord has previously used a variety of large-scale deep learning models for AutoMod, but it now intends to integrate language models from OpenAI to enable AutoMod to interpret the context of a message mo