Discord updates its bot with ChatGPT-like features, rolls out AI-generated conversation summaries and more

Discord is the latest company to get in on the AI frenzy. The company announced today that it’s launching a set of new AI experiences to a number of servers.

Most notably, Discord is updating its Clyde bot with OpenAI ChatGPT technology that will allow users to have extended conversations with the bot. You can type @Clyde in a server to chat with Clyde in any channel. You also can ask Clyde to start a thread for a group of your friends to hang out. Discord notes that Clyde can recommend playlists, and access GIFs and emojis like any Discord user.

“Throughout Discord, you may already see Clyde responding to slash commands or DMing you if you’ve made an error,” Discord said in a blog post. “And next week, Clyde is coming to (artificially intelligent) life, natively within Discord, using OpenAI technology.”

You can ask Clyde to do things like send you a gif or share five interesting facts about cats. The company is testing and iterating the product and believes that it will become a fundamental part of the Discord experience.

Discord is also updating its AutoMod moderation tool to harness the power of large language models. AutoMod now uses OpenAI technology to find and alert moderators whenever server rules may have been broken, while being aware of the context of a conversation. The AutoMod AI experiment begins in a limited number of servers today. 

The company says that since introducing AutoMod last year, the tool has automatically blocked more than 45 million unwanted messages from servers before they even had a chance to be posted based on server rules. 

Discord is also launching AI-generated conversation summaries. The new feature is designed to bundle streams of messages into topics so users can quickly catch up or join in on topics they’re interested in. With these new summaries, some users will start to see a new panel on the right side of their screen that will outline topics that have been discussed. Conversation summaries can be enabled in Server Settings and will be rolling out to a limited number of servers starting next.

In addition to these three new AI experiences, Discord shared that it’s imagining other ways that it can incorporate AI into its platform. Discord announced that it’s open sourcing Avatar Remix, an app that lets users remix each others’ avatars through generative image models. Developers can find the Avatar Remix code on GitHub starting today. The company is also exploring a shared visual space to collaborate with friends and colleagues that includes an AI-powered text-to-image generator users can experiment with together.

The company also shared that it’s launching an AI incubator and dedicating resources to developers that want to build AI on Discord. The incubator is launching as part of Discord’s $5 million commitment to funding developers and startups to bring their expertise to the platform. Participants will get access to cash grants, office hours with Discord development teams and early access to Discord platform features.

Since its launch a few months ago, Open AI’s ChatGPT has dominated the internet and become increasingly popular, which has led to AI becoming an increasingly trending topic over the past few months. As a result, it’s not surprising that Discord is adding an AI chatbot to its own messaging platform.

Discord isn’t the only platform that has added new AI features, as Snapchat and Slack recently integrated ChatGPT-like features into their products as well.