AI vs. Human Moderators: A Comparative Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs in Content Moderation for Brand Safety

As the volume of video content online grows exponentially, the demand for moderation of unsafe videos has surpassed human capabilities, posing both operational and mental health challenges. While recent studies demonstrated the merits of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in various video understanding tasks, their application to multimodal content moderation, a domain that requires nuanced understanding of both visual and textual cues, remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we benchmark the capabilities of MLLMs in brand safety classification, a critical subset of content moderation for safe-guarding advertising integrity. To this end, we introduce a novel, multimodal and multilingual dataset, meticulously labeled by professional reviewers in a multitude of risk categories. Through a detailed comparative analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MLLMs such as Gemini, GPT, and Llama in multimodal brand safety, and evaluate their accuracy and cost efficiency compared to professional human reviewers. Furthermore, we present an in-depth discussion shedding light on limitations of MLLMs and failure cases. We are releasing our dataset alongside this paper to facilitate future research on effective and responsible brand safety and content moderation.