Discord is taking a deeper dive into the AI space with a new conversational AI named Clyde.
Clyde’s AI rework was announced Thursday, as the popular chat platform unveiled a wide collection of new AI tools and experiments, including an OpenAI-based chatbot update.
You may not use Discord every day or at all, but it has become a popular destination for people who want to have group discussions about topics like gaming, pets, anime, coding, and other nerdy activities. According to Discord, 150 million people chat on the service every month.
It has also become a key hub for creating AI content, with 30 million users using the platform’s AI apps each month, according to Discord.
While most people are already familiar with the OpenAI DALL-E 2 AI image generation tool, Discord users have been creating images with Midjourney’s generative AI tools for just as long. The difference with Discord, however, is the community enhancement that revolves around AI content creation.
As Discord CEO Jason Citron explained on Tuesday, Discord provides “AI at your fingertips, together.”
Next week, Discord will release the OpenAI-enhanced Clyde as a free public experiment.
Like the new Chatbot Bing, Clyde uses OpenAI’s large language model to engage in conversation. You call Clyde, agree to use him on your server and in your group, and then you can start asking Clyde questions the same way you chat with ChatGPT.
The difference is that since Clyde works in a Discord chat environment, he needs to be aware of group discussion dynamics. Not only will Clyde turn on and break the group chat, mentioning it will allow Clyde to join. Clyde acts as a true Discord member and can include GIFs and emojis in his replies (ChatGPT in Bing can use emojis but not GIFs).
Clyde can search for information to resolve a dispute or help with a group project. As with everything else on Discord, administrators can easily disable Clyde.
While we’ve seen a lot of abuse of AI chatbots, Discord’s Citron preceded the announcements by reiterating how hard they are working to enable all of this “in a safe and trustworthy environment.”
Other AI experiments
Outside of chat, Discord is actively rolling out AI capabilities across the platform, with many going live as limited experiments next week.
To help server moderators, Discord is improving its AutoMod tool, which already uses preset keywords to proactively block content from group chats with AI that takes proactive moderation a step further.
For example, if you posted in your group chat that the group does not allow self-promotion, or off-topic topics such as sailboats, AutoMod AI may use that post to block posts that violate these rules. He can do this even when the post is in a different language.
Discord chats are often quite active, and since no one can spend 24/7 monitoring them, Discord is adding the Conversation Summary Experiment. As the name suggests, it can read previous Discord discussions with a prompt to reveal who was talking and the context of all messages.
For example, if someone at the end of a long chat asks you if you’re coming to the “event on Saturday”, you can ask the AI to summarize previous chat activity to find out what event they were talking about – and if you want to attend.
We also took a look at some interesting AI tools, one focused on productivity and the other mostly pure fantasy.
Avatar Remix is available to take advantage of the prompt to apply a generative image update to a member’s avatar. Discord showed us how easy it is to add a birthday hat to one avatar and a mustache to another. The effect is realistic and quite clever. Of course, there may be concerns about image abuse, but at least the tool is only useful to people who have already signed up for your group.
Discord plans to put the open source code on GitHub so that developers can fork, mix and extend the Remix code.
There is also a new, powerful-looking, integrated whiteboard with artificial intelligence. This will be the first real-time shared whiteboard in Discord. AI integration lets you use simple sketches and text prompts to generate rich, expressive images. Discord claims it can “solve the blank canvas syndrome” many people have with these AI image generation tools.
However, to try out any of these AIs, you need to be on Discord. This means setting up an account, joining the server, and finding or creating your own groups. It’s not difficult, but for the uninitiated, Discord can be overwhelming. However, these cool tools might inspire you to give it a try.