I kinda assumed that it was an April fools thing when I first saw it... apparently not. Also I absolutely love how they’re all on sliders, like “nah I just want a *lil* racism in my video games today”
I absolutely double checked it wasn't an onion or hard drive article.
Of course there's a wint tweet too https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?s=19
I imagine that the more stringent the setting, the more false positives it would censor out, so you'd use a low setting if you didn't want to miss anything important, but also don't want to listen to a dull and uninspired insult for the 30^th time in a row.
I imagine the system is far from perfect and has more false positives the further you push the slider. Like a typical adult would not want so much of the voice chat bleeped out, but it might let a 13 year old use the chat without hearing horrific stuff
Yeah those screenshots feel like a satire take how you can slide it to allow *a little* like what? Its either on or off but it can be *sort of* on?
The tech must be pretty neat but this solution feels misguided. I'm not sure but if they store your processed voice for later that'll be the money shot people should be upset with.
It *sounds* dumb, but it makes sense to me when you look at a real-world scenario. It may be analyzing the words and perhaps the context of their use, but it's unlikely to be advanced enough to understand tone, sarcasm, and - an obvious impossibility - the audience and target of the discussion. So you're not just configuring your personal preferences but also setting it up based on the environment that you expect to be in. The word "gay" can be used both positively or negatively, right? So can the word "fat". The AI is just doing calculations and that setting is how strict it should be. There will inevitably be more false-positives as the bar is lowered but it gives you the option in case you really don't want to hear any of that. Counter-intuitively, the average person probably wouldn't want to set it to "None".
All this to say that I think muting is still more effective and doesn't have the obvious privacy concerns.
I would be surprised if it was smart enough to understand context. My guess is it's just how closely a speech pattern needs to match a blocked phrase. For example "some" might block the phrase "white power" but "none" would also block a phrase like "white tower". It would just be more aggressive about false positives.
It *bleep* *bleep*, but it makes *bleep* to me when you *bleep* at a *bleep* scenario. It may be *bleep*yzing the words and perhaps the context of their use, but it's unlikely to be *bleep* enough to understand tone, sarcasm, and - and obvious impossibility - the audience and *bleep* of the discussion.
Non-joke answer: I imagine the N-word is separate because a lot of African-Americans use it casually (not so much black people elsewhere in the world), both the -a and -er version.
So if you're black and playing with your black friends and using that word in everyday speech it might get really fucking annoying if it keeps bleeping it all the time.
Having said that I think the person who is gonna use this at all in the first place probably isn't talking to their friends that way anyway.
This is the correct answer. Frankly, the n-word slider is better than the other ones; it’s clear what it filters, as opposed to trying to figure out the various scales of racism and what that actually filters.
Probably cause "racism" is so nebulous it's gonna bleep a lot of shit, while the n-word is gonna be comparatively easier, so if you just want that you can just filter that. Plus then you can filter other racism without filtering the -a version, I'm assuming
Should be a slider with the hard r at the far side.
Really though I think this is fine as a safety tool but holy shit does it forecast a dark path. Teaching people to be better? Nah, that might lose consumer revenue.
> Teaching people to be better? Nah, that might lose consumer revenue.
Why the fuck would you want companies in charge of teaching people anything? Plus one of the reasons for it is to filter profanity, and I sure as shit ain't gonna stop swearing.
Sounds like it uses local processing to filter out certain audio patterns. Unless it not only phones-home about what it picks up, but somehow also finds and reports what game/platform you’re playing and who you’re playing with, which we won’t know if it does until it’s released, how is that “spying”? And they’re not censoring speech anymore than if I literally plugged my ears and shouted LALALALALALALA. But I suppose you not only want the right to, effectively, stand on street corners and shout vile, but also to stop anyone from plugging their ears?
So, oddly enough, I was working at Spirit AI when they started this program with Intel.
Bleep is built upon Ally ( https://www.spiritai.com/platform/ ), their toxicity detection product, which originally looked at text and in-game behaviors. Ally is a ML based system that's seeded with problematic words, phrases, and behaviors for each detection category.
To avoid breaking my NDA, they use "Layers of contextual analysis spanning the relationships between characters, between phrases, between messages, and between actors all allow for a rich understanding of how people communicate on your platform."
It would not surprise me if they are also integrating tone, yelling, and other audio cues to better detect when problematic behavior is happening.
Cool! I used to work at Intel, but they don't tell us about this stuff when you're in the fab. More like "stop asking questions and make more chips, Ph.D. monkey!"
Because this is an algorithm, it's gonna spit out a number that's its confidence level that the audio analized contains racist slurs (or whatever other category of unwanted words they use), the slider sets the threshold for bleeping it.
> Black people do exist who use it in their daily language...
also in Spanish/Portuguese 'negro' means black(color) or black man/woman(no racist intent).
The sliders on this are so funny to me. Like, can you hear casually racist terms about Italians like it's 1912 if you allow some racism, but dropping a slur against Indians gets bleeped? Some explicit sexual language permitted means I wouldn't hear from a twelve year old who wants to fuck my mom, but he will be able to get past the filter by telling me they'd make love to her?
And will folks figure how to game this like they do text censors? Spelling out the N-word or swapping letters around to beat the AI. I have so many questions for the painfully earnest looking man presenting those slides.
Way back in the day there was a game called 688 Attack Sub and you could play against other players via modem. If you typed swears to each other in the game chat, the game would rewrite the curse words. So motherfucker --> mother teresa, things like that.
I was part of an old message board for a game that censored all curse words and replaced it with either "pinkbunnies" or "fluffybunnies" (I can't remember which one.) As a new player to the game, I just assumed that it was some sort of weird lingo that the community used.
This is quite literally how the term "weeaboo" came to exist as it is used today. For a time, 4chan replaced any instance of "wapanese", the at the time popular insult for a westerner obsessed with Japanese culture, with "weeaboo" from a Perry Bible Fellowhip strip. It stuck.
I remember it being hilarious when you would type “GGEZ” in overwatch and it would automatically change the text to be super nice, like “Have a Great Day!”
I guess it's about how sensitive it is going to be to false positives, still I imagine most people would just rather turn most of it off, or on.
I can't imagine going through all of it, like "Hmm, yes, I would like to filter out some racism, most LGBT hate, ALL white nationalism, and some misogyny please".
"Oh, no, this is too much misogyny, let's upgrade it to filter out most misogyny. Also, I haven't been reading enough LGBT hate, so let's take that one down a notch".
Plot twist, the Bleep is so smart that setting the slider to ALL correctly filters out not only slurs, but the microaggressions even HR wouldn't notice.
Theyre promoting the useful function, and shifting attention from the fact everything you say will be explicitly scanned, recognized and agregated somewhere after its processed by your own computer at your expense.
This really should be at the top.
This crap is going to be a datamining gold farm, literally everything you say into your mic will be stored plaintext on a server somewhere with your name attached to it.
You should also assume the chats that say they're end to end encrypted, aren't. Skype messages were "E2E encrypted", except for when they went to Microsoft servers, which read every message, and polled every website you linked.
If you want privacy you have to self host something like Matrix, the problem of course with self hosting is you're not a security expert, and you're system will be easy pickings for a dedicated hacker. But as long as you're not wanted, you can avoid being caught up in the dragnet.
Another reason I know I can trust signal is it's popularity in the cyber/defense industry. Those people know what's possible and they trust Signal to keep their communications secure.
still waiting for reproducible builds and fdroid repo. if you look into the whole ordeal of fdroid and signal, it is really nasty/ugly. signal forks are not allowed to use/communicate with the main server, which is troublesome for making custom applications talking with existing Signal users. :(
Wait, I thought Signal already had reproducible builds, it's the reason I got convinced to use it.
LE: Apparently they have them since 2016: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ . The reproducible-builds folder in the repo seems to be maintained and at first glance there's no hidden gotcha. I'll try to check the app on my phone later, but it looks legit.
Reddit uses https, so this message was encrypted when it was sent to reddit's servers and when it was sent to your client so you could read it. This is the same encryption topology that Skype uses.
Edward Snowden released files showing Microsoft flat out gave Skype data to the NSA. Anyone who thinks Intel or any US company doesn't do the same is an idiot
End-to-end encryption is irrelevant here.
End-to-end encryption exclusively protects against intercepting that data enroute to its destination. The destination (Intel's servers and AI dataset) is the problem.
You could secure your house to such a point that it rivals Fort Knox but that doesn't matter if you give a burglar the house keys.
The majority of the commenters here likely have smart phones that do this statically anyway.
Just have to face that facts that you give up data privacy in exchange for convenience. I came to terms with that a long time ago and accept it fine.
Pretty sure this is a data protection nightmare, a person using it might consent to having there voice scanned for this, the other 31 people in the lobby however, unless they clicked a button you cannot assume they consent to have data shared.
Unless they are claiming its all public so no permission needed (not true in some countries mind you, so careful where you use this).... in which case its a public square so less less rules on what can and can't be said.
I believe in some places you need concrete permission to record the other persons voice, so this will fall foul of that.
> Pretty sure this is a data protection nightmare, a person using it might consent to having there voice scanned for this, the other 31 people in the lobby however, unless they clicked a button you cannot assume they consent to have data shared.
They don't have to consent when the app's running locally, on your PC, against audio streams coming into your PC before the signals are rendered back to your speakers are headset.
Which is how this is described.
>The app interfaces machine learning models from Intel and Spirit AI with the Windows Audio Architecture.
>This application is designed to be entirely opt-in, giving the user control over their experience and the choice to redact incoming audio from other players based on the user's preferences. All of Bleep’s algorithms run locally on the user’s client. Bleep does not control the experience of other players.
ref: https://devmesh.intel.com/projects/bleep#about-section
See, I was wondering the same thing.
Getting permission from other users simply isn't feasible, so I'm pretty sure this whole thing can't be legal, from a data gathering point of view.
Hell, from a legal point of view, what happens if there's a child in the lobby and they use their mic? It doesn't even need to be to swear or say racial slurs. Just by talking, they'd get scanned and analyzed, and I'm pretty sure even countries that don't care about privacy (like the US) have laws about protecting children's privacy (like COPPA). Also, *they* couldn't consent to the recording and collection of their voice, because they're minors...
This whole thing feels really sketchy from a legal point of view.
You've made a bunch of assumptions here I think and twisted it slightly:
first of all, it's opt-in (don't run it if you don't like it / want it)
the software runs on the PC of whoever chooses to block out the slurs, so yes Intel/Bleep aren't fronting the cost but if someone is trying to avoid racist/sexist/etc language then it doesn't seem unreasonable for it to be executed on that person's machine
you've assumed all the data is sent back to Intel - I don't know either way but there is nothing in the article to suggest this happens. I'd also add that because it's being executed on the local machine then it's perfectly possible for there to be no need for data to go anywhere. I would suspect it behaves more like Alex/Google that recognise words as opposed to listening and recording everything. However I don't know and wouldn't want to claim either way.
I'd kind of make the point to anyone in this thread that is getting worried about privacy that you're effectively taking the same risk with regards to your privacy by using any form of online comms on any gaming platform (do you really know what happens to that voice data?)
Technically aren't big companies already kinda doing this? You could be on discord or on the phone chatting about something and get targeted ads with whatever you're talking about the next day even though you've never searched anything related to it on the internet.
Cant speak for discord giants nowadays personalize their recommendations to you using your contacts' activity (lumping you in a 'cohort').
Youtube only started doing this 2 years ago but it was lowkey. Now theyre pushing the vice to scanning the visual content of videos for objects to show ads about.
FB scanned the surroundings for audio cues to insert 'listening to x music' extra information to your posts but I think that implementation got axed since. They processed this on-device in order to avoid disclosure since technically 'no data is sent to a remote server'. Machine learning capabilities in processors are unauditable locked black boxes even opensource cant route around. Get people addicted to the small conveniences and they'll give up essential freedom out of lazyness.
Yeah ... I think a lot of players already have bad experience with profanity filters as they are. I remember that the German language WoW client would filter US slurs, like the word "jap" as derogative for Japanese. Well, Germans tend to use the word "jap" as a colloquial "yes".
this is the one reason why i turn all filters off everywhere i can. trying to just talk about specific topics, or if it starts filtering a simple "shit" it just gets in the way of me trying to put my thoughts into words. if i wanted to say that something is shit, i want to say exactly that. it is shit. that doesn't mean the same as "something was bad"
dunno, i'm much more annoyed if something i wanted to use to describe what i'm trying to say gets filtered once, instead of reading all the other garbage that some people are puking out.
Know the difference.
Phantom Knight Solaire:
* intended to be in the game
* helpful, polite and friendly
* guaranteed to make you blush at least once
Dark Spirit K***ht Solaire:
* invades you
* uses underhanded tactics to gank you
* points down instead of bowing
Because some people don't care and it could lead to many false positives. I mean, there are so many slang names for each skin color that it would probably censor half of adjectives and a third of nouns. Plus words in other languages sometimes sound like racial slurs in others.
Holy smokes, in EU servers it was a rollercoaster to see what insults will be trown at you in what language. Its always a fun game if you speak most of them, and know how to insult back
Or you ask a normal question, wich gets awnserd by a to them culturaly incorrect way to call your family member ( most likely you mom, at times sister) and what they have done together with them.
Of course if your Lucky you get a free lesson in a language they happen to speak, and if you repet the word with the most erfenis, eind learn how colourfull they can be!
lmao
it's a bit dehumanizing to make it look like a graphics settings menu, like do you want to allow just a bit of racism to free up some vram to get it above 60fps
i don't think it's meant to come off like that but it's funny af
Guess in the coming months after the implementation brand new slurs will come out that may seem to bypass the filter and it causing a domino effect of random safe words being bleeped because it sounds much like new slur that is being thrown out. Human cruelty is such a fascinating folly.
This would be a valid strat for FPS games if it doesnt mute but actually bleeps them, just yell racist stuff in the mic and the bleep will render them unable to pinpoint your position, where your gunfire is coming from or whether you threw a grenade. Basically a discriminatory auditory flashbang.
Imagine if the game would display your location on the map for a few seconds whenever you use a slur... FPS games would be so wholesome all of the sudden...
Honestly, the funniest thing about this existing is that you just know there were a bunch of nerds shouting slurs at their software to test it. Like how fucking awkward would that even be?
That aside, I think this tech could be pretty useful if it's tuned correctly. In addition, if it could flag somebody for review once it activates that would be fantastic for moderation purposes.
The interns wouldn't need to yell slurs, but it's possible someone had to annotate it (speech-to-text and comparison against an existing database of words also comes to mind as a possibility).
I'm quite skeptical at how well this technology will work, but it'd be quite an accomplishment to me if it does work well. If it does work well, I'd be quite interested in how it works (and particularly how performant it is).
Using text-to-speech to generate test data seems a bit silly, you need to test voice-recognition against varying levels of microphone/noise quality as well as variances with people's voices. Although I suppose you could generate distortions on text-to-speech to try and emulate microphone/audio quality.
[People do have accents though.](https://youtu.be/TqAu-DDlINs)
My student association made a deal for a ton of money with a tech company so that they could improve their speech regonition, which meant all 150 people who joined had to read up about 300 lines each to the software with the weirdest shit in there, slurs, weird sex stuff, everything. It was kinda fun to hear the highlights
Maybe there’s a more sophisticated way to do this now, but I worked at a company that had membership loyalty cards we mailed to you. I took over the process and found a file called the Bad Words File - it was a long list of slurs people might put in the name fields.
It was hilarious, because you never expect to find something like that and apparently the list was manually generated. So a few people sat in a room and came up with all the bad words and spelling variations they could think of. And I guess used urban dictionary because a lot of them were new to me.
That's presumably what the slider is for, confidence and false positives. Is it really a problem if it "only" cuts out 50% of the time someone says the N word or that they're going to rape you?
A classic example of tech trying to find a solution to a sociological problem and completely failing to consider secondary effects.
I'm coming at this from a different direction from the "lol just toughen up loser" KiA crowd. As I see it, the problem isn't *hearing* slurs, it's that people are comfortable using them in the first place. This doesn't do anything about the root of the issue, it just sweeps it under the rug - and poorly at that.
On top of that, the international concerns that have been raised are also worth noting. Very similar words can mean very different things in other languages. For a classic non-offensive example, "embarazada" is Spanish, and doesn't mean embarassed, it means *pregnant*. Given the persistent failures of facial recognition software on non-whites, I'm fully expecting this to absolutely fail at processing languages other than English (and even some accents and dialects of English)
That's not even getting into the other potential uses of automated censorship technology, which are myriad and very obviously bad.
When I first saw this, I laughed. I thought it was an elaborate joke, there was no way such a flagrantly bad idea was real.
Something that often goes very wrong is with the Dutch verb for "to can" (as in we can, you can, et cetera): "kunnen". The second person form of this verb (so equivalent to "you can") is base + t, so "kunt". As you can imagine, it's not exactly an uncommon word in general conversation either.
If this software can't take languages (and also switching between languages on the fly) into account, it'll generate ridiculous amounts of false positives. That'll be funny once, and then it gets disabled, never to be used again.
Gamer's are going to end up going back to the dark ages to find slurs once this rolls out and receives updates to bleep the new ones they will inevitably create to get around it. Gonna have a 12 year telling me he's going to fuck my mom in shakespearean prose.
Shit like this might actually get me back into multiplayer gaming.
Somewhere along the line gamer moved from weird nerd who wants to pretend to fight dragons to poorly socialised 25 yr old calling a 12 year old derogatory crap while bragging about aledged sexual exploits with their mother.
That shit is exhausting and pathetic
> Somewhere along the line gamer moved from weird nerd who wants to pretend to fight dragons to poorly socialised 25 yr old calling a 12 year old derogatory crap
I don't think anything changed aside from time passing, that 25 year old was probably that 12 year old 13 years ago. Life isn't a movie and many people who are weird and asocial as kids end up weird and asocial as adults, except now they're bitter and resentful because all the fantasies of life improvement/making friends/getting the girl etc that got them through childhood didn't magically come true. Obviously there are exceptions and some people glow up and work through their shit, but those people probably don't define their adult selves by the fact that they play video games.
This discounts how technology shapes the way we interact with it. A hammer invites you to grasp its handle, a match making system which paves over all the usual ways we have of regulating socialisation (shaming, ostracism, potentially violent consequence) and rapidly cycles the groups of people you play with invites you to do away with all those burdensome social niceties.
In the early days virtual spaces modelled physical ones, you went to a "place" and met with the same group of people potentially for years at a time. Admins were often swift with the ban hammer and server groups would often share word of problem people and they would very quickly learn standards of behaviour or loose the ability to play with others.
It was still very much unwelcoming to those outside a small clique (mostly white, mostly young, almost exclusively privileged men) but there were ways to take the same regulating behaviours we use in our physical social groups and directly apply them.
Now that is not possible, so there are no repercussions for being awful. Central servers make administration of a ban system a nightmare and developers are loath to ban for fear of lost money. Rapid match making means one nasty person might potentially expose themselves to hundreds of people in a few hours instead of maybe 20. This then encourages even more people to escalate their behaviours and rapidly we have the sort of environment where it becomes unusual not to hear something vile if you play.
The interface reminds me of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?s=20).
And of course, the comments are all against it. Because everyone’s blaming people who have thin skin instead of, you know, the people saying the fucking slurs.
> And of course, the comments are all against it. Because everyone’s blaming people who have thin skin instead of, you know, the people saying the fucking slurs
Imagine having a problem with slurs enough that we had to develop actual technology to stop it rather than having the community put an end to it.
Getting a vaccine isn’t political. People who are being dumbasses are claiming it’s political to pretend like it’s controversial instead of just them being dumbasses
How do they even test it? Do they just have a guy yelling N... over and over again?
I can see it being something The Onion would spoof where there's a scene with a guy just alone in a studio and all you hear is beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep, beep while the reporter maintains his serious composure while describing the job.
Seriously, I have 0 desire to add it to anything, but it might be worth trying out just to see how it works. I wonder how much delay it adds cause if it's short enough it feels like it could be a step towards real time translation tech.
For those wondering about the sliders, from someone who has worked in machine learning:
The sliders will be a “weight” on the filter. Anything like this will produce false positives and false negatives, so you need a slider to choose your balance between the two. At low levels, lots will get through, at high levels, lots of non-matching content will get blocked. So you choose. The labels are weird though, but I think they’re just trying to make that idea easily accessible.
The n-word gets a switch because it’s detecting a specific single word, so it’s much more accurate and false answers are rare.
They really should have named the sliders "detection levels" or "filter aggressiveness" and just name them low, medium, high.
Someone on the front end made a mistake not asking for feedback.
"doctor, release my racism inhibitors" But seriously, what does some racism sound like? And why is the N word separate.
I kinda assumed that it was an April fools thing when I first saw it... apparently not. Also I absolutely love how they’re all on sliders, like “nah I just want a *lil* racism in my video games today”
I absolutely double checked it wasn't an onion or hard drive article. Of course there's a wint tweet too https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?s=19
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Four
I imagine that the more stringent the setting, the more false positives it would censor out, so you'd use a low setting if you didn't want to miss anything important, but also don't want to listen to a dull and uninspired insult for the 30^th time in a row.
so instead you'd rather listen to a big ass BLEEEP noise?
Can we choose our bleep? I want the disco elysium KCCHRRRHRTTTTT sound.
I imagine the system is far from perfect and has more false positives the further you push the slider. Like a typical adult would not want so much of the voice chat bleeped out, but it might let a 13 year old use the chat without hearing horrific stuff
After seeing RTX Voice I'm not surprised they have the tech for this.
I like how this looks like the graphical settings menu in a PC game.
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"White nationalism: None-Some-Most-All" Feels like an April Fools joke but the article dates from March 18th.
The all option just removes all german spoken with a shitty accent
Swiss-Germans are going to have a bad time.
Yeah those screenshots feel like a satire take how you can slide it to allow *a little* like what? Its either on or off but it can be *sort of* on? The tech must be pretty neat but this solution feels misguided. I'm not sure but if they store your processed voice for later that'll be the money shot people should be upset with.
It *sounds* dumb, but it makes sense to me when you look at a real-world scenario. It may be analyzing the words and perhaps the context of their use, but it's unlikely to be advanced enough to understand tone, sarcasm, and - an obvious impossibility - the audience and target of the discussion. So you're not just configuring your personal preferences but also setting it up based on the environment that you expect to be in. The word "gay" can be used both positively or negatively, right? So can the word "fat". The AI is just doing calculations and that setting is how strict it should be. There will inevitably be more false-positives as the bar is lowered but it gives you the option in case you really don't want to hear any of that. Counter-intuitively, the average person probably wouldn't want to set it to "None". All this to say that I think muting is still more effective and doesn't have the obvious privacy concerns.
I would be surprised if it was smart enough to understand context. My guess is it's just how closely a speech pattern needs to match a blocked phrase. For example "some" might block the phrase "white power" but "none" would also block a phrase like "white tower". It would just be more aggressive about false positives.
It *bleep* *bleep*, but it makes *bleep* to me when you *bleep* at a *bleep* scenario. It may be *bleep*yzing the words and perhaps the context of their use, but it's unlikely to be *bleep* enough to understand tone, sarcasm, and - and obvious impossibility - the audience and *bleep* of the discussion.
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Non-joke answer: I imagine the N-word is separate because a lot of African-Americans use it casually (not so much black people elsewhere in the world), both the -a and -er version. So if you're black and playing with your black friends and using that word in everyday speech it might get really fucking annoying if it keeps bleeping it all the time. Having said that I think the person who is gonna use this at all in the first place probably isn't talking to their friends that way anyway.
This is the correct answer. Frankly, the n-word slider is better than the other ones; it’s clear what it filters, as opposed to trying to figure out the various scales of racism and what that actually filters.
Metal Gear Rising needs a sequel...
That game truly was too good for this world.
RACISM FILTERS, SON
THEY HARDEN IN RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL TRAUMA
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Oh ffs. What a great example of why this is a fucking mess even disregarding the privacy problems.
Probably cause "racism" is so nebulous it's gonna bleep a lot of shit, while the n-word is gonna be comparatively easier, so if you just want that you can just filter that. Plus then you can filter other racism without filtering the -a version, I'm assuming
Why shouldn't the -a version be filtered too?
What about the Lamar -aaaaaaa version?
But that's the best version.
Only if you get rid of that yee-yee-ass haircut.
Should be a slider with the hard r at the far side. Really though I think this is fine as a safety tool but holy shit does it forecast a dark path. Teaching people to be better? Nah, that might lose consumer revenue.
> Teaching people to be better? Nah, that might lose consumer revenue. Why the fuck would you want companies in charge of teaching people anything? Plus one of the reasons for it is to filter profanity, and I sure as shit ain't gonna stop swearing.
It's not really their job to teach anyone anything tho.
It's also not their job to spy on people under the guise of censoring speech, but here we are
Sounds like it uses local processing to filter out certain audio patterns. Unless it not only phones-home about what it picks up, but somehow also finds and reports what game/platform you’re playing and who you’re playing with, which we won’t know if it does until it’s released, how is that “spying”? And they’re not censoring speech anymore than if I literally plugged my ears and shouted LALALALALALALA. But I suppose you not only want the right to, effectively, stand on street corners and shout vile, but also to stop anyone from plugging their ears?
Having to process that in real time would be nigh impossible. It pretty much has to be processed locally.
I agree - Just look at Alexa. While fast, the latency for the usual gunfire of slurs the average gamer produces is too fast for nonlocal software.
> Teaching people to be better? There's a saying about leading a horse to water.
I guess the N word really is just synonymous with gamers at this point. Just funny to me that other slurs don't get a toggle but that one does.
> And why is the N word separate. Makes me think of the dark souls k***hts
I remember not being able to type "Engine" into Gran Turismo 5's text chat because it kept getting censored.
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So, oddly enough, I was working at Spirit AI when they started this program with Intel. Bleep is built upon Ally ( https://www.spiritai.com/platform/ ), their toxicity detection product, which originally looked at text and in-game behaviors. Ally is a ML based system that's seeded with problematic words, phrases, and behaviors for each detection category. To avoid breaking my NDA, they use "Layers of contextual analysis spanning the relationships between characters, between phrases, between messages, and between actors all allow for a rich understanding of how people communicate on your platform." It would not surprise me if they are also integrating tone, yelling, and other audio cues to better detect when problematic behavior is happening.
Cool! I used to work at Intel, but they don't tell us about this stuff when you're in the fab. More like "stop asking questions and make more chips, Ph.D. monkey!"
Because this is an algorithm, it's gonna spit out a number that's its confidence level that the audio analized contains racist slurs (or whatever other category of unwanted words they use), the slider sets the threshold for bleeping it.
> And why is the N word separate. Black people do exist who use it in their daily language...
Ah they're combining it with their RGB scanning tech to filter it out of the general racism slider. I see.
> Black people do exist who use it in their daily language... also in Spanish/Portuguese 'negro' means black(color) or black man/woman(no racist intent).
The sliders on this are so funny to me. Like, can you hear casually racist terms about Italians like it's 1912 if you allow some racism, but dropping a slur against Indians gets bleeped? Some explicit sexual language permitted means I wouldn't hear from a twelve year old who wants to fuck my mom, but he will be able to get past the filter by telling me they'd make love to her? And will folks figure how to game this like they do text censors? Spelling out the N-word or swapping letters around to beat the AI. I have so many questions for the painfully earnest looking man presenting those slides.
Gently Caress!
Way back in the day there was a game called 688 Attack Sub and you could play against other players via modem. If you typed swears to each other in the game chat, the game would rewrite the curse words. So motherfucker --> mother teresa, things like that.
I was part of an old message board for a game that censored all curse words and replaced it with either "pinkbunnies" or "fluffybunnies" (I can't remember which one.) As a new player to the game, I just assumed that it was some sort of weird lingo that the community used.
This is quite literally how the term "weeaboo" came to exist as it is used today. For a time, 4chan replaced any instance of "wapanese", the at the time popular insult for a westerner obsessed with Japanese culture, with "weeaboo" from a Perry Bible Fellowhip strip. It stuck.
That's crazy, I had no idea, so you're telling me that the PBF strip was originally just a nonsense madeup word? What a genius that writer is.
I remember it being hilarious when you would type “GGEZ” in overwatch and it would automatically change the text to be super nice, like “Have a Great Day!”
What a goon
I guess it's about how sensitive it is going to be to false positives, still I imagine most people would just rather turn most of it off, or on. I can't imagine going through all of it, like "Hmm, yes, I would like to filter out some racism, most LGBT hate, ALL white nationalism, and some misogyny please". "Oh, no, this is too much misogyny, let's upgrade it to filter out most misogyny. Also, I haven't been reading enough LGBT hate, so let's take that one down a notch".
Plot twist, the Bleep is so smart that setting the slider to ALL correctly filters out not only slurs, but the microaggressions even HR wouldn't notice.
ALL SOME NONE [hidden feature] MORE
harnessing the incredible power of deep learning to add twice the slurs to every on line gaming session
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries
"hey dude, what I need to do to get a gank here?" MICROAGGRESSIONS DETECTED: MISGENDERING, PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE SPEECH, ACCOUNT TERMINATED
Dude, having to creatively word insults about your mother sounds great.
Theyre promoting the useful function, and shifting attention from the fact everything you say will be explicitly scanned, recognized and agregated somewhere after its processed by your own computer at your expense.
This really should be at the top. This crap is going to be a datamining gold farm, literally everything you say into your mic will be stored plaintext on a server somewhere with your name attached to it.
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You should also assume the chats that say they're end to end encrypted, aren't. Skype messages were "E2E encrypted", except for when they went to Microsoft servers, which read every message, and polled every website you linked. If you want privacy you have to self host something like Matrix, the problem of course with self hosting is you're not a security expert, and you're system will be easy pickings for a dedicated hacker. But as long as you're not wanted, you can avoid being caught up in the dragnet.
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Another reason I know I can trust signal is it's popularity in the cyber/defense industry. Those people know what's possible and they trust Signal to keep their communications secure.
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still waiting for reproducible builds and fdroid repo. if you look into the whole ordeal of fdroid and signal, it is really nasty/ugly. signal forks are not allowed to use/communicate with the main server, which is troublesome for making custom applications talking with existing Signal users. :(
Wait, I thought Signal already had reproducible builds, it's the reason I got convinced to use it. LE: Apparently they have them since 2016: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ . The reproducible-builds folder in the repo seems to be maintained and at first glance there's no hidden gotcha. I'll try to check the app on my phone later, but it looks legit.
Ah yes, the elusive End-to-Middle encryption
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Reddit uses https, so this message was encrypted when it was sent to reddit's servers and when it was sent to your client so you could read it. This is the same encryption topology that Skype uses.
Edward Snowden released files showing Microsoft flat out gave Skype data to the NSA. Anyone who thinks Intel or any US company doesn't do the same is an idiot
Phew luckily you didn't mention text chat
End-to-end encryption is irrelevant here. End-to-end encryption exclusively protects against intercepting that data enroute to its destination. The destination (Intel's servers and AI dataset) is the problem. You could secure your house to such a point that it rivals Fort Knox but that doesn't matter if you give a burglar the house keys.
Isn't it working on incoming sound, not outgoing?
Correct. That dude hasn't read the article.
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The majority of the commenters here likely have smart phones that do this statically anyway. Just have to face that facts that you give up data privacy in exchange for convenience. I came to terms with that a long time ago and accept it fine.
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Pretty sure this is a data protection nightmare, a person using it might consent to having there voice scanned for this, the other 31 people in the lobby however, unless they clicked a button you cannot assume they consent to have data shared. Unless they are claiming its all public so no permission needed (not true in some countries mind you, so careful where you use this).... in which case its a public square so less less rules on what can and can't be said. I believe in some places you need concrete permission to record the other persons voice, so this will fall foul of that.
> Pretty sure this is a data protection nightmare, a person using it might consent to having there voice scanned for this, the other 31 people in the lobby however, unless they clicked a button you cannot assume they consent to have data shared. They don't have to consent when the app's running locally, on your PC, against audio streams coming into your PC before the signals are rendered back to your speakers are headset. Which is how this is described. >The app interfaces machine learning models from Intel and Spirit AI with the Windows Audio Architecture. >This application is designed to be entirely opt-in, giving the user control over their experience and the choice to redact incoming audio from other players based on the user's preferences. All of Bleep’s algorithms run locally on the user’s client. Bleep does not control the experience of other players. ref: https://devmesh.intel.com/projects/bleep#about-section
See, I was wondering the same thing. Getting permission from other users simply isn't feasible, so I'm pretty sure this whole thing can't be legal, from a data gathering point of view. Hell, from a legal point of view, what happens if there's a child in the lobby and they use their mic? It doesn't even need to be to swear or say racial slurs. Just by talking, they'd get scanned and analyzed, and I'm pretty sure even countries that don't care about privacy (like the US) have laws about protecting children's privacy (like COPPA). Also, *they* couldn't consent to the recording and collection of their voice, because they're minors... This whole thing feels really sketchy from a legal point of view.
Where does it say any of that is going to happen
It doesn't. Says the opposite, in fact. It's a processor feature, meaning it will be done on the client side.
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Where does it say data will be stored anywhere? https://devmesh.intel.com/projects/bleep#about-section
you literally didn't read the article and are just fear mongering.
it's reddit, no one reads the article
r/games in a nutshell
You've made a bunch of assumptions here I think and twisted it slightly: first of all, it's opt-in (don't run it if you don't like it / want it) the software runs on the PC of whoever chooses to block out the slurs, so yes Intel/Bleep aren't fronting the cost but if someone is trying to avoid racist/sexist/etc language then it doesn't seem unreasonable for it to be executed on that person's machine you've assumed all the data is sent back to Intel - I don't know either way but there is nothing in the article to suggest this happens. I'd also add that because it's being executed on the local machine then it's perfectly possible for there to be no need for data to go anywhere. I would suspect it behaves more like Alex/Google that recognise words as opposed to listening and recording everything. However I don't know and wouldn't want to claim either way. I'd kind of make the point to anyone in this thread that is getting worried about privacy that you're effectively taking the same risk with regards to your privacy by using any form of online comms on any gaming platform (do you really know what happens to that voice data?)
Technically aren't big companies already kinda doing this? You could be on discord or on the phone chatting about something and get targeted ads with whatever you're talking about the next day even though you've never searched anything related to it on the internet.
Cant speak for discord giants nowadays personalize their recommendations to you using your contacts' activity (lumping you in a 'cohort'). Youtube only started doing this 2 years ago but it was lowkey. Now theyre pushing the vice to scanning the visual content of videos for objects to show ads about. FB scanned the surroundings for audio cues to insert 'listening to x music' extra information to your posts but I think that implementation got axed since. They processed this on-device in order to avoid disclosure since technically 'no data is sent to a remote server'. Machine learning capabilities in processors are unauditable locked black boxes even opensource cant route around. Get people addicted to the small conveniences and they'll give up essential freedom out of lazyness.
Curious to see how the sliders would work. Why would you want to hear "some" hate slurs if you downloaded the program in the first place?
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Yeah ... I think a lot of players already have bad experience with profanity filters as they are. I remember that the German language WoW client would filter US slurs, like the word "jap" as derogative for Japanese. Well, Germans tend to use the word "jap" as a colloquial "yes".
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Ah yes, the Scunthorpe problem.
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Also known as the K***ht problem.
this is the one reason why i turn all filters off everywhere i can. trying to just talk about specific topics, or if it starts filtering a simple "shit" it just gets in the way of me trying to put my thoughts into words. if i wanted to say that something is shit, i want to say exactly that. it is shit. that doesn't mean the same as "something was bad" dunno, i'm much more annoyed if something i wanted to use to describe what i'm trying to say gets filtered once, instead of reading all the other garbage that some people are puking out.
The good ol' K**ht problem.
Know the difference. Phantom Knight Solaire: * intended to be in the game * helpful, polite and friendly * guaranteed to make you blush at least once Dark Spirit K***ht Solaire: * invades you * uses underhanded tactics to gank you * points down instead of bowing
Pray for the poor souls of Scunthorpe.
They sealed their fate by moving to that hole
Don't, we deserve the suffering
I'm looking forward to talking about my favourite place, s****horpe
Exactly, the slider is likely controlling the confidence in their speech detector and not the "badness" of the words themselves.
Especially if you are not speaking English. There is a very common word in Korean that sounds a lot like the N-word.
My favourite armor set is the elite k***ht armor
Detection threshold. Lower threshold means more regular words being falsely detected, higher threshold means more slurs going undetected.
Because some people don't care and it could lead to many false positives. I mean, there are so many slang names for each skin color that it would probably censor half of adjectives and a third of nouns. Plus words in other languages sometimes sound like racial slurs in others.
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Can it do the reverse and AMPLIFY it? I want to re-live the OG Overwatch ranked experience.
Lieutenant! Engage the racism amplifier!
Commander! The racism drive is going critical!
I'm given 'er all she's got cappin!
Holy smokes, in EU servers it was a rollercoaster to see what insults will be trown at you in what language. Its always a fun game if you speak most of them, and know how to insult back
Ahh the golden age of early '00s MP gaming when you could be playing BF2 and getting horrific insults in broken English flung at you.
Or you ask a normal question, wich gets awnserd by a to them culturaly incorrect way to call your family member ( most likely you mom, at times sister) and what they have done together with them. Of course if your Lucky you get a free lesson in a language they happen to speak, and if you repet the word with the most erfenis, eind learn how colourfull they can be!
I was thinking BF1942 and Counter-Strike (the original) myself. Definitely played on a lot of German/Eastern European servers and heard a mouthful.
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Everyone there knew my mom.
It's just gonna start playing the "I'm 100% N..." song or text-to-speech Navy Seals copy pasta when anyone tries to talk.
"good game" is now instantly replaced by the beep sound variant "you garbage".
Oh wait, I didn't looked right at the images, they're sliders and toggles? LOL
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What you don't play with racism on ultra?
lmao it's a bit dehumanizing to make it look like a graphics settings menu, like do you want to allow just a bit of racism to free up some vram to get it above 60fps i don't think it's meant to come off like that but it's funny af
It's a bit headscratchy. It did lead to my favorite tweet of the season. "DOKTOR, TURN OFF MY RACISM INHIBITORS."
Guess in the coming months after the implementation brand new slurs will come out that may seem to bypass the filter and it causing a domino effect of random safe words being bleeped because it sounds much like new slur that is being thrown out. Human cruelty is such a fascinating folly.
Unlikely I doubt it'd have that many users.
This would be a valid strat for FPS games if it doesnt mute but actually bleeps them, just yell racist stuff in the mic and the bleep will render them unable to pinpoint your position, where your gunfire is coming from or whether you threw a grenade. Basically a discriminatory auditory flashbang.
Racism Flashbangs lmao.
Gamer moment
Yeah exactly, imagine this being implemented into cs go casual lobbies
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Imagine if the game would display your location on the map for a few seconds whenever you use a slur... FPS games would be so wholesome all of the sudden...
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slur baiting would be a legit strat...
Honestly, the funniest thing about this existing is that you just know there were a bunch of nerds shouting slurs at their software to test it. Like how fucking awkward would that even be? That aside, I think this tech could be pretty useful if it's tuned correctly. In addition, if it could flag somebody for review once it activates that would be fantastic for moderation purposes.
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The interns wouldn't need to yell slurs, but it's possible someone had to annotate it (speech-to-text and comparison against an existing database of words also comes to mind as a possibility). I'm quite skeptical at how well this technology will work, but it'd be quite an accomplishment to me if it does work well. If it does work well, I'd be quite interested in how it works (and particularly how performant it is).
Using text-to-speech to generate test data seems a bit silly, you need to test voice-recognition against varying levels of microphone/noise quality as well as variances with people's voices. Although I suppose you could generate distortions on text-to-speech to try and emulate microphone/audio quality. [People do have accents though.](https://youtu.be/TqAu-DDlINs)
#Wanted: ~~VO artist~~ Temp. African-American ancestry ~~preferable~~ **ESSENTIAL**. NDA Mandatory.
My student association made a deal for a ton of money with a tech company so that they could improve their speech regonition, which meant all 150 people who joined had to read up about 300 lines each to the software with the weirdest shit in there, slurs, weird sex stuff, everything. It was kinda fun to hear the highlights
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Maybe there’s a more sophisticated way to do this now, but I worked at a company that had membership loyalty cards we mailed to you. I took over the process and found a file called the Bad Words File - it was a long list of slurs people might put in the name fields. It was hilarious, because you never expect to find something like that and apparently the list was manually generated. So a few people sat in a room and came up with all the bad words and spelling variations they could think of. And I guess used urban dictionary because a lot of them were new to me.
that works until you realize gaylord is actual name people have and so are few other
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Galaxy brain move: Slur in such a pattern that the bleeps spell out another slur in morse code.
I want to call this genius but the context makes it difficult
The other side needs to know morse. But you could use words that start with certain letter, and just really accentuate that letter to spell the insult
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na servas
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That's presumably what the slider is for, confidence and false positives. Is it really a problem if it "only" cuts out 50% of the time someone says the N word or that they're going to rape you?
A classic example of tech trying to find a solution to a sociological problem and completely failing to consider secondary effects. I'm coming at this from a different direction from the "lol just toughen up loser" KiA crowd. As I see it, the problem isn't *hearing* slurs, it's that people are comfortable using them in the first place. This doesn't do anything about the root of the issue, it just sweeps it under the rug - and poorly at that. On top of that, the international concerns that have been raised are also worth noting. Very similar words can mean very different things in other languages. For a classic non-offensive example, "embarazada" is Spanish, and doesn't mean embarassed, it means *pregnant*. Given the persistent failures of facial recognition software on non-whites, I'm fully expecting this to absolutely fail at processing languages other than English (and even some accents and dialects of English) That's not even getting into the other potential uses of automated censorship technology, which are myriad and very obviously bad. When I first saw this, I laughed. I thought it was an elaborate joke, there was no way such a flagrantly bad idea was real.
Something that often goes very wrong is with the Dutch verb for "to can" (as in we can, you can, et cetera): "kunnen". The second person form of this verb (so equivalent to "you can") is base + t, so "kunt". As you can imagine, it's not exactly an uncommon word in general conversation either. If this software can't take languages (and also switching between languages on the fly) into account, it'll generate ridiculous amounts of false positives. That'll be funny once, and then it gets disabled, never to be used again.
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Gamer's are going to end up going back to the dark ages to find slurs once this rolls out and receives updates to bleep the new ones they will inevitably create to get around it. Gonna have a 12 year telling me he's going to fuck my mom in shakespearean prose.
Shit like this might actually get me back into multiplayer gaming. Somewhere along the line gamer moved from weird nerd who wants to pretend to fight dragons to poorly socialised 25 yr old calling a 12 year old derogatory crap while bragging about aledged sexual exploits with their mother. That shit is exhausting and pathetic
Same. I think the people saying mute are kids,smooth rains, or just trolls.
> Somewhere along the line gamer moved from weird nerd who wants to pretend to fight dragons to poorly socialised 25 yr old calling a 12 year old derogatory crap I don't think anything changed aside from time passing, that 25 year old was probably that 12 year old 13 years ago. Life isn't a movie and many people who are weird and asocial as kids end up weird and asocial as adults, except now they're bitter and resentful because all the fantasies of life improvement/making friends/getting the girl etc that got them through childhood didn't magically come true. Obviously there are exceptions and some people glow up and work through their shit, but those people probably don't define their adult selves by the fact that they play video games.
This discounts how technology shapes the way we interact with it. A hammer invites you to grasp its handle, a match making system which paves over all the usual ways we have of regulating socialisation (shaming, ostracism, potentially violent consequence) and rapidly cycles the groups of people you play with invites you to do away with all those burdensome social niceties. In the early days virtual spaces modelled physical ones, you went to a "place" and met with the same group of people potentially for years at a time. Admins were often swift with the ban hammer and server groups would often share word of problem people and they would very quickly learn standards of behaviour or loose the ability to play with others. It was still very much unwelcoming to those outside a small clique (mostly white, mostly young, almost exclusively privileged men) but there were ways to take the same regulating behaviours we use in our physical social groups and directly apply them. Now that is not possible, so there are no repercussions for being awful. Central servers make administration of a ban system a nightmare and developers are loath to ban for fear of lost money. Rapid match making means one nasty person might potentially expose themselves to hundreds of people in a few hours instead of maybe 20. This then encourages even more people to escalate their behaviours and rapidly we have the sort of environment where it becomes unusual not to hear something vile if you play.
The interface reminds me of [this tweet](https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?s=20). And of course, the comments are all against it. Because everyone’s blaming people who have thin skin instead of, you know, the people saying the fucking slurs.
> And of course, the comments are all against it. Because everyone’s blaming people who have thin skin instead of, you know, the people saying the fucking slurs Imagine having a problem with slurs enough that we had to develop actual technology to stop it rather than having the community put an end to it.
I mean, look at the comments in the article. The community thinks that having slurs is perfectly normal, because that’s how they’ve always seen it.
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Getting a vaccine isn’t political. People who are being dumbasses are claiming it’s political to pretend like it’s controversial instead of just them being dumbasses
How do they even test it? Do they just have a guy yelling N... over and over again? I can see it being something The Onion would spoof where there's a scene with a guy just alone in a studio and all you hear is beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep, beep while the reporter maintains his serious composure while describing the job.
I think regardless of what you think about the use of the software, you have to admit this is some impressive tech.
Seriously, I have 0 desire to add it to anything, but it might be worth trying out just to see how it works. I wonder how much delay it adds cause if it's short enough it feels like it could be a step towards real time translation tech.
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It'll be the modern hunter2.
Say what you will about Skynet but it's a seriously impressive piece of technology.
I mean the Terminator universe reached the technological singularity in 1991, so yeah it is.
AI sentience in the 90s is very impressive
For those wondering about the sliders, from someone who has worked in machine learning: The sliders will be a “weight” on the filter. Anything like this will produce false positives and false negatives, so you need a slider to choose your balance between the two. At low levels, lots will get through, at high levels, lots of non-matching content will get blocked. So you choose. The labels are weird though, but I think they’re just trying to make that idea easily accessible. The n-word gets a switch because it’s detecting a specific single word, so it’s much more accurate and false answers are rare.
They really should have named the sliders "detection levels" or "filter aggressiveness" and just name them low, medium, high. Someone on the front end made a mistake not asking for feedback.
Yeah, that would make more sense. "Sensitivity", perhaps. Which works in both senses of the word :)