Correct text & formatting function (AI)

[Alpha1]

It regularly happens that members post a wall of text with poor grammar. i.e. no line breaks, bad spelling and formatting mistakes. This is hard to read and sometimes completely unreadable.

It would be nice and helpful to have a function to check the text and suggest new spelling and formatting. For example by a editor button / link the member can click.
AI could suggest text improvements, which the member may want to apply.

And for moderators this can also be very useful to be able to quickly turn an unreadable message into a readable one.

 

[Lee]

While not against this, all these AI service calls are going to get expensive, no?

 

[Alpha1]

In general LLM calls can get expensive, but not for this feature.
The call would only be made if a user clicks on it. It would only send the text of the post, so its quite limited.

 

[Lee]

Yeah, I understand.

I'm just curious, if all these AI features ever come to light, the monthly cost of running a forum is going to increase quite a lot isnt it?

 

[Suzanne O]

No thanks. Don't want my forum run by artificial intelligence robots. They get misused too much and can wreck your database.

 

[Alpha1]

Features will always be optional and up to the administrator to turn on or not.

There are other suggestions I can think of that would be expensive and therefore I'm not posting those. I do expect that llm calls will become much cheaper over time. AI will also open up new opportunities to monetize forums, so it works both ways.

I'm already using AI text formatted functionality for free by combining several free services and manually converting the texts into it.

 

[Lee]

Yeah I agree with all of the above.

Yeah, i have written myself an addon to scan all user submitted content for illegal harms.

Send me a message for your ideas and I’ll see if it’s something I’m interested in playing with.

I am still learning though so progress may be slow.

 

[Alpha1]

Yeah, i have written myself an addon to scan all user submitted content for illegal harms.

Scanning all content will indeed be costly at this point in time. I think that when scanning mass content, its probably best to then get all the relevant functionality to save cost. i.e. correct title, prefix, tags, correct thread type, illegal harms, rule breaches, formatting, related content, ads, etc, etc. Else it would become costly to scan content for each purpose, again and again.

 

[Lee]

Again, I absolutely agree with this statement.

I only need a harm scanner in the short term but there is no reason this can’t be expanded

 

[Alpha1]

Consider that various LLM company are giving discounts or free credits to Non-profits. AWS (Amazon) for example:

The AWS Nonprofit Credit Program - Nonprofit Cloud Solutions - AWS

Providing AWS Promotional Credit to nonprofits all over the world.

aws.amazon.com

Such programs are accessible trough https://techsoup.org or directly through their website. I believe your website would likely qualify for such free credits if you have registered a non-profit.

 

[Ricsca]

No thanks. Don't want my forum run by artificial intelligence robots. They get misused too much and can wreck your database.

but is your forum www.aussiefootyforums.com or do you have others?

 

[Suzanne O]

but is your forum www.aussiefootyforums.com or do you have others?

I have 2 others and plenty more from third party sites. We don't use artificial intelligence because we think it's a load of rubbish.
Just because AI is a trend it doesn't means that it's needed by everyone.

 

[Alpha1]

Here's an example LLM. I'm using this AI text formatting app a lot:

AI Text Formatter App – Clean Up & Structure Text Instantly

Use our AI text formatter app to instantly fix text formatting issues. Remove unwanted spaces, align paragraphs, and structure content effortlessly.

textformatter.ai

Its awesome, as it quickly converts large walls of text into well formatted, easy to read posts. It includes headings, line breaks, punctuation, paragraphs, lists, etc.
It does not correct spelling mistakes. If I find a free LLM that does both, then I'll switch to that.

 

[zappaDPJ]

Its awesome, as it quickly converts large walls of text into well formatted, easy to read posts. It includes headings, line breaks, punctuation, paragraphs, lists, etc.

It did a superb job with the wall of text I fed it but it did take a while, just under a minute.

 

[Alpha1]

Yes, I just had a new member post a 1000 word wall of text. I fixed it up for him so instead of an unreadable wall of text, we now have an easy to read highly valuable post. His reply was:

Thanks for the correction. I was too speedy. This is very Friendly

This illustrates how such functionality enhances the forum experience.

 

[Digital Doctor]

AI = wordsmith

 

[jul]

This can definitely done. Formatting and grammar/spelling corrections are quite easy and inexpensive. I also do it for summarization and content moderation (to trigger warnings for admins to then inspect).

I mostly run through OpenRouter unless I can find cheaper alternatives. Find a model that’s both cheap and does well on this task (+high seo ranking). Make sure you set clear boundaries to not alter any of the content but just focus on formatting/grammar/etc…
I was really surprised at first how pretty large texts only cost me a very small fraction of a cent. There are also free models out there that are decent who could cover a large proportion of use for free! Then use a paid cheap model as fallback if the free one doesn’t work due to limits.

Only thing is you have to set limitation to user end to prevent abuse as they might be able to spam spelling/grammar checks = token abuse.
You also have to be careful that you need to make sure the language remains natural. Spelling and grammar checks existed before ai and were used a lot. AI is more powerful because of it being context aware yet you don’t want it to go all out as you remove human identity from your forums.

I’d personally would only allow this for your own posts as admin along with other staff members of your forums. Plus an option for moderation that you could press for easy fixes on other people posts (but always show original text too). If you would want it for every user then I suggest hard limitations and option for tone/personality along with user report system to log where it fails.