FAQ / Why Sightengine

How does Sightengine compare to human moderation?

There are a number of ways in which our service is different from human moderators. While human moderators can be relevant to cover some specific needs or situations, we believe our automated solution will become the default approach to most use-cases thanks to its many advantages:

  • Cost: automated moderation is a lot cheaper than human moderation (typically 10 times cheaper).
  • Speed and Scalability: our service is more than 10 times cheaper than human moderators and 20 times faster.
  • Availability: while it can become costly to have always-on rotating teams of human moderators to review content at any moment of the day and year, our API will be there for you 24/7.
  • Auditability: our results and moderation decisions are easily auditable. Along with each moderation decision, you get a description of the content found, its position in the image (when looking for specific objects or gestures), in the video (along with the engine's confidence score) or in the text.
  • Consistency: while it can be hard to maintain consistent moderation rules across a team of human moderators, our API results will remain consistent if a user submits the same image several times. That said, we do perform model updates on a continuous basis to improve our coverage.
  • Privacy: images remain private as no humans will be looking at the images or videos to moderate them. This is especially useful for GDPR compliance and for content that is expected to stay fully private such as images shared in direct messages.

That said, using our API does not mean you can not have a hybrid moderation process with human moderators reviewing cases for which our models are not entirely "sure", i.e. for which the probability scores are below a predefined threshold. See this question to know more.

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