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Call of Duty enlists AI to eavesdrop on voice chat and help ban toxic players
- psychphysic 3y agoBut surely they realise that's the entire player base?
- polski-g 3y agoThey should offer a moderated and non moderated server selection choice and let the players decide how to filter themselves
- Cypher 3y agoPeople will just make their own servers and they'll have to sue them to close them down.
- no_time 3y agoAnd Activision does sue them. This is how we lost the xlabs project a few months ago. Still makes me sad to think about it because some of the MWII servers were like a third place to me. On that note, I have an offline dump of their gh org. If someone wants try resurrecting it, I can hook you up. https://twitter.com/XLabsProject https://twitter.com/XLabsProject
- millzlane 3y agoYeah, because what is a world without racism and sexism. That just isn't fun. Amiright?
- psychphysic 3y agoBy definition the gamers are adults, and playing at murder. Some as terrorists. Can't they just mute or block people they don't like? Cheating is the only real problem.
- fxtentacle 3y agoIt's a game where you are actively pretending to murder other people... and your biggest concern is that people might say something inappropriate or offensive (while you're watching increasingly realistic depictions of dead people)? Don't get me wrong, I love Doom Eternal, but this just seems hypocritical to me. FPS games aren't meant to be family friendly and safe. Their main attraction is that they're not.
- regularjack 3y agoIt's a game. People play it to have fun. Racist, sexist, insulting comments are not my idea of fun.
- hgs3 3y agoPeople also play games to appeal to their darker aggressive more primitive mind - their "Id" as Freud would put it. It is why games like Grand Theft Auto are best sellers. Even in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you participate in a mass shooting at a Russian airport. The sequence is a simulated act of terrorism. So I agree with OP that it is ethically inconsistent for the developers to draw the line at spoken words.
- valianteffort 3y agoI have fond memories of playing MW2 and Halo 3 in highschool with all of my friends. I don't think "racism" was on anyones mind in those days and it was an extremely diverse group. There wasn't a racial epitath we weren't throwing around, yet no one ever took things personally and I would never describe any of those people as racist. People these days are way too soft and incapable of dissemenating between real hate and momentary anger.
- Cypher 3y agoUnder new age anti-racism ideology, all white people are born racist. It's a useful tool to supress anyone unwilling to go along with this new age thinking.
- t1mmen 3y agoBattlebit Remastered was an eye opener for me. 254 player first person shooter with cross-team proximity chat sounded like a recipe for disaster, but they made it work thanks to heavy moderation. After 50 or so hours, I’ve heard no more than two handfuls of toxic, sexist, racist remarks. The global announcements when the banhammer swings are a glorious deterrent. I can’t enjoy myself in toxic games anymore, so I’m glad to see this development happening in the AAA space, too!
- i8comments 3y agoBlizzard made the same empty promises about AI voice chat moderation of Overwatch 2. The AI tech's proficiency at identifying and banning slurs and what not was greatly exaggerated (ie, it did not work at all), but now every previously private conversation you have with your friends gets recorded and stored and can be accessed not just by Blizzard, or whomever eventually hacks Blizzard, but also by the police.
- GenericDev 3y agoA lot of you are missing the point that censorship is a slippery slope. And that this kind of moderation exists as surveilance tool. I do not understand why people are so excited to allow this kind of surveillance creep across all aspects of their life. I can't leave my house without being monitored by ring cameras. I cannot go to work without being monitored by badge systems. And now, I can't play games without my voice chat being moderated. I'm not a racist, sexist, terrible, or bad person. Why do I have to be forced to be surveilled and monitored like this in ever freaking part of my life, and why do you all jump so gleefully into these ecosystems? Why are you so excited to throw away these areas of your life to be monitored and controlled by companies?
- t1mmen 3y ago> I'm not a racist, sexist, terrible, or bad person. Why do I have to be forced to be surveilled and monitored like this […] I am not a racist, sexist, terrible or bad person, either. Why should I be forced to listen to that shit? While I’m a huge proponent of privacy and against surveillance at scale, the truth is, neither of us are forced to do anything here. We can both turn off VoIP in these games.
- GenericDev 3y agoThis isn't the only solution to this problem. We shouldn't be jumping to this end immediately.
- t1mmen 3y agoLike what? How? In my 25+ years if gaming, I have only seen it (mostly) solved in smaller/niche games where the community is small and healthy already (usually targeting “older” gamers), and when server admins are actively doing “their job”. … or, with a similar system as is being utilized (Battlebits Remastered)
- GenericDev 3y agoLook random internet person. I'm not going to sit here and try to solve an incredibly complex problem - one that I don't have the tools or ability to even begin to approach. But I am telling you that monitoring and surveillance is not the first, second, or even tenth potential choice available to start tackling this problem.
- JoeyBananas 3y agoNow that Microsoft owns Activision, it doesn't surprise me that they are going to introduce a bunch of new rules and run it like every other stupid Microsoft product that I'm forced to use for work. For me, COD stopped being cool when the series started moving away from the real-life tacticool vibe towards more SciFi "laser guns" type stuff. Microsoft gonna Microsoft.