Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has implemented AI technology to monitor voice chat for toxic users. Call of Duty is a franchise that is pretty well-known for its toxicity. It’s one of the staples of online gaming and is one of the core franchises where users will tell you that they are going to have relations with your mother or just repeatedly call you heinous slurs over and over again. It’s not the most pleasant thing in the world, but it is something that fans have come to associate with the series. However, in recent years, Activision has been working to clean up their lobbies and have enabled ways to disable voice chat for abusive users.
Now, things are escalating. Earlier this year, it was announced Call of Duty would be implementing AI technology to help monitor in-game voice chat. That has been activated in Modern Warfare 3 and it will report players who are deemed to be behaving too toxic in voice chat. The AI can not actually punish players, it can only call attention to those it deems as inappropriate. A human will review the report and then determine if they need to be punished. Activision and Modulate, the company behind the AI, issued statements on the AI’s purpose earlier this year.
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“There’s no place for disruptive behavior or harassment in games ever. Tackling disruptive voice chat particularly has long been an extraordinary challenge across gaming. With this collaboration, we are now bringing Modulate’s state of the art machine learning technology that can scale in real-time for a global level of enforcement,” said Michael Vance, Chief Technology Officer, Activision. “This is a critical step forward to creating and maintaining a fun, fair and welcoming experience for all players.”
“We’re enormously excited to team with Activision to push forward the cutting edge of trust and safety,” said Mike Pappas, CEO at Modulate. “This is a big step forward in supporting a player community the size and scale of Call of Duty, and further reinforces Activision’s ongoing commitment to lead in this effort.”
The AI rolled out in beta back in August and so far, we have yet to see any reports of the AI creating problems. Of course, this is all happening under the hood, so players being banned unfairly wouldn’t really be able to determine if it was a result of the AI. Things seem to be going smoothly so far, though.
