Microsoft Wants To Use AI To Bleep Out Bad Words In Xbox Live Party Chat (arstechnica.com) 58
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.
What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added): "Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game." Microsoft told The Verge that the ultimate goal is a system "similar to what you'd expect on broadcast TV where people are having a conversation, and in real-time, we're able to detect a bad phrase and beep it out for users who don't want to see that." However, instead of live engineers that are doing the censoring, Microsoft is employing machine learning.
What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added): "Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game." Microsoft told The Verge that the ultimate goal is a system "similar to what you'd expect on broadcast TV where people are having a conversation, and in real-time, we're able to detect a bad phrase and beep it out for users who don't want to see that." However, instead of live engineers that are doing the censoring, Microsoft is employing machine learning.
Easy peasy ... (Score:3)
... make up proxies for bad words.
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Goldang! That's some dadburn language. I mean, like, jeeze.
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You're a dam homophone. How about you put some caulk in your schist crack.
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Or just train it.
"Go the yourself!"
"No, you go the yourself!"
I await all articles being bleeped out, followed by the letter 'e' and the number 8.
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> ... make up proxies for bad words.
You smeghead! That will never frak'n [wikipedia.org] work! /s
Accents (Score:3)
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You don't even need to do that. Speech recognition often fails with accents it is not trained on so just swear in a fake accent of your choice and it will probably work fine.
The Navy has a saying.
The difference between a fairy tale and a sea story: A fairy tale starts, "Once upon a time," and a sea story starts with, "Hey, this ain't no shit!"
So, hey, this ain't no shit. I used Dragon Naturally Speaking to participate in a text-only chat room and the members were discussing my Texas accent.
I responded and what came out was, "I don't have no Texas accident."
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I think we solved this problem already. I don't get much v1agra spam any more.
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Good point except we're talking censoring audio.
Belgium! (Score:3)
Try and bleep that out!
Count (Score:2)
Ironic (Score:3)
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Many games don't have chat because they can't stop people saying stuff which takes a E rated game up to 18+. For example they might only offer a selection of canned statements rather than letting you say arbitrary things.
Players can also censor each other already, with the mute option.
The fact that voice chat is so universally bad also means that a lot of people just don't use it. For them it's dead already. So they might now be able to use it, which I'm sure Microsoft prefers. I expect Microsoft will make
Worst idea yet. (Score:3, Insightful)
First this is censorship (not a 1st amendment issue). Rarely a good idea.
Second it's developing tech that can be used for political censorship. Effectively Microsoft is creating the weapons of Dictatorship.
Third, its talking about curse words, not hate speech. They aren't trying to make the world a better place, they are making it a more religiously acceptable world.
Basically they are kowtowing to a bunch of petty wannabe language dictators and in the process creating tools for China, North Korea etc. to oppress their people over far more serious issues.
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I don't give much of a shit about so called "foul language" but when some pissant little shit wont stop with the SUCK MY ________ YOU DIRTY ______ SUCKER every 15 seconds I'll just go play something else. MS knows I'm an adult with money in my pocket, and are trying to address this issue to keep me in the ecosystem.
This is capitalism, not "kowtowing to a bunch of petty wannabe language dictators."
Take your outrage back to your console gaming cesspool while you still can. Adults are talking.
Re: Worst idea yet. (Score:3)
not sure what world you and microsoft grew up in that needs a hyper complex unworkable alternative to the mute button.
But it must suck hairy goats balls.
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Some games already have this on their text chat, and it's cranked up to 11.
Type in a sentence that includes the word damn? Sentence gets dropped.
Something sucks? Dropped.
Two unrelated words in a row combine to form something that sounds naughty? Dropped.
It makes it nearly impossible to communicate, and the kids are just typing in "fuc/king" to bypass it anyway, so it fails at its one purpose.
I'm looking at you, Ark.
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1984 is a doubleplesgood manual.
In fact, it is a documentary.
In a game about buttbuttination ... (Score:2)
Seriously, this is so insanely Catholiban...
Most of the games today are about literal serial murder, and they wanna censor some "bad words".
In by book, anyone who wants to censor "bad words" is a closeted schizophrenic suicide bombing *child rapist*. No exceptions.
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All of these complaints can be made about spam filters too.
It's censorship. Filters than can remove v1agra sales pitches can be used to remove political speech. It's about unwanted adverts, not hate speech.
In fact I imagine that anti-spam technology is already deployed in China to police social networks. Throw in some ad-blocking tech to prevent people posting illegal memes too.
Re:There are more than two arthropods (Score:3)
There's a difference. It's not trying to police what you can say. It's me having the ability to police what I hear.
If I don't want to hear your damn, shit, and fuck every time you die then I can set my level to "Rated G" and you can rage on while I still get to participate in voice chat. The alternative right now is that I don't join voice chat at all, but then I don't get any tactical benefits of being on voice chat.
I'm curious to see how well they do since TV broadcasts have a delay to get the bleep/si
More censorship (Score:2)
Just like on broadcast T.V. (Score:3)
Where there is a 7 second delay...
I sure as shit hope there isn't a 7 second delay in online FPS.
So real-time censoring of dynamic content... sure , any second now.
So... what's up with profanity censoring? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm serious, what's the big deal about profanity censoring? Was there some sort of study that showed that kid that heard more 'Fuck' had some sort of negative impact or something?
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My guess is so they can lower the ESRB ratings for online games, to reach larger audiences.
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My guess is so they can lower the ESRB ratings for online games, to reach larger audiences.
Hmm you're off the point. The question I'm asking is why there are ESRB ratings (or any other form of profanity censorship) at all?
It's a Catholiban thing. (Score:1)
It stems from puritan rules related to making sexuality and nudity and bodily functions taboos. Which makes as much sense as making cooking and eating taboos. Or sleeping and resting.
Which, I think, only exist as a tool to gain power over people. Since it specifically makes a taboo out of the one thing literally every human does and wants to do and has to do, as without it, humanity would literally go extinct.
So that *everyone* can be a "sinner". So that *everyone* has to "repent" and follow some crazy proc
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A teacher explained it to me once. The issue is not so much psychological damage to the child, although that's certainly possible with things like racial slurs. The problem is that children haven't developed the social skills to moderate their use of such words, so tend to use them at inappropriate times. Thus parents prefer that the get as little exposure as possible.
It's the same with porn. Children don't see it for the fantasy that it is because they don't really know any better, it's usually the only ex
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Alright, valid point and nicely presented.
Still, I would have answered to that teacher that most developed countries doesn't have as much censoring as the US and many (like Canada and the northern Europe. Yeah, Always the same bunch) still got better rating that the US in many aspects (like the Happiness Index).
Now I'm not saying there's a clear link between the two, but it couldn't hurt to import a few habits.
No swearing (Score:2)
This kina stuff will still get through...
"Do you think its possible your mom wont love you anymore if she sees how bad your loosing in the game?"
This has always been fun (Score:2)
Seymor Butts
Amanda Kisanold
Hugh Jass
Current age:
phuk
1337
fukk
azzhole
Future?
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> Future?
mansplaining
incel
cuck
Oh wait, that's the excuse these Stupid Juvenile Whiners keep complaining about. Gee, maybe offensive words are relative.
Microsoft can just ... (Score:3)
What's next? (Score:3)
We'll be fined in one credit for violation of verbal morality?
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Probably. I mean you can already get banned if someone reports your foul language. In fact it's extremely harsh, they give your account a lifetime ban and can even remote brick your XBOX.
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Can you back up a single instance on a bricked Xbox from foul language with references?
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Maybe that was a bit hyperbolic, but if they ban your account hard enough they can ban the actual XBOX itself too. Same as they do for people who cheat and people who mod their consoles, in order to prevent them just creating new accounts.
Imagine the future (Score:2)
Realtime voice recognition + realtime deepfakes means that companies in the right position (Device/OS vendors: Google, Apple, Facebook, ISPs: Comcast, Verizon, nation states: China, Russia, ...) might be able to alter the web in realtime. Imagine a world where we both visit the same web site, but see different content. The text, images, ads, even videos could be altered to represent a different viewpoint.
What would you do with that power? Personally, I'd replace all food with tacos.
Microsoft's defiance of freedom of expression (Score:2)
Words or Ideas (Score:1)
The scunthorpe problem. (Score:2)
Fuck that (Score:2)
1) Be from Scunthorpe
2) Use a basic wireless mic
I have a super easy fix! (Score:2)
Don't use chat! 100% of users who disable party chat have reported NOT being called a racial slur by an adolescent in party chat. There. Solved.
New game! (Score:2)
Kids in the 2010s: Finding ways to make text2speech features in games say nasty words.
Kids in the 2020s: Find the way around the bleepin' filter to say them themselves.
Quite frankly, this is what's going to happen. Have you ever tried to censor a Scotsman? Hell, I have trouble understanding one if they get upset.
but "live" TV (Score:2)
Isn't. They can bleep because they are on a delay. Not sure how AI would help predict words as you are speaking them. Every time you say fu* it bleeps, even if the rest o the word was fun, fudge, fundamental etc? Maybe they could steal a little time from the pauses in natural speech and speed up the words a bit so that the whole phrase or sentence takes the same amount of time but is compacted a bit but ends up taking the same time to hear. Don't know sounds hard to make sound good. Would be like you are ta
Don't be evil Microsoft. (Score:1)
Remove swearing from the gaming community? Well.. (Score:1)
Edited for Television (Score:1)
But then how will I know... (Score:2)
what that 9 year old kid did with my mother?
Taking a lesson from the Microsoft Tay debacle? (Score:2)
Wow, Tay was only 2016? Seems like it was a lot longer ago than that...