Trash-talking is as old as video games themselves. People have been slamming each other in video game competitions since time immemorial, especially when it comes to network-linked games. It's just part of the package.
So of course a woke gaming company wants to put a stop to it:
Activision last week began listening in to gamer chatter using an AI program which scans conversations for "toxicity."
The gaming giant has partnered with tech firm Modulate to develop ToxMod, a program which searches both in-game text and voice chats for "hate speech, discriminatory language, sexism, harassment, and more."
The "ToxMod" bot has reportedly begun eavesdropping on two recent high-profile Call of Duty releases; the monitoring program is set to go global soon.
Here's how the woke nannies at Activision describe it:
Call of Duty's new voice chat moderation system utilizes ToxMod, the AI-Powered voice chat moderation technology from Modulate, to identify in real-time and enforce against toxic speech — including hate speech, discriminatory language, harassment and more.
Let me translate that for you: "In addition to monitoring and punishing actual hateful and/or offensive language on our servers, we're also going to start punishing a huge range of historically normal trash-talk and banter because we're afraid if we don't then woke gamers will get mad at us on Twitter."
That's about it.
Modulate, meanwhile, has reportedly partnered with the super-woke Anti-Defamation League to help program ToxMod to recognize "white supremacists" and "alt-right extremists," two terms that definitely haven't expanded in recent years to mean essentially "anyone woke activists don't like." So nothing to worry about there.
More impressively, the AI will reportedly be trained to recognize what it deems "radicalization" tactics:
"[W]e've developed the category to identify signals that have a high correlation with extremist movements, even if the language itself isn't violent. (For example, ‘let's take this to Discord' could be innocent, or it could be a recruiting tactic.)"
So if you want to go chat with your buddies on Discord, Activision may now very well be suspecting you of being a radical white supremacist. Got it. Really makes you want to play Call of Duty, doesn't it?
I don't know about you but I'm glad I grew up in the early days of Halo when you could just play games and not worry about woke tech overlords.
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