[viraptor]

You can't run a public service without moderation, unless you want to end up with a toxic swamp. Definitely not a kids game. Typically it's worked around by not allowing player to player chat at all, or making it extremely limited, but even then you get workarounds (see dark souls with "try finger, but hole")

Moderation is trying to enforce some standards for the whole environment. Even if you got the tools to implement filtering for yourself, you're still sitting there with people who are happy with the abusive environment and will get through one way or another. And you get them everywhere around you. It's not something that each player can deal with separately unless they opt into private groups - but that's not the environment Roblox is encouraging.

[brigadier132]

I'd rather not have any moderated discussions than give totalitarian dictatorships the ability to monitor all communication in real time.

[sodality2]

Don't use Roblox then. I guarantee every parent ever would rather their kids have access to a moderated Roblox than an unmoderated one, though.

[SpaceLawnmower]

This analogy doesn't make sense for a game designed exclusively for kids where the "totalitarian government" is the company that runs the game.

[brigadier132]

There's no analogy. Like most technology this is dual use and can easily be repurposed for mass surveilance.

[viraptor]

Voice recognition and saving audio streams is not new. It has basically nothing to do with this tech. It's not getting repurposed for surveillance.

[brigadier132]

> It's not getting repurposed for surveillance.

This absolutely will be used for surveillance. It's literal express purpose is surveillance and automated behavior modification.

[viraptor]

Why? Surveillance and voice recognition has been possible for a long time. Low cost triggering on phrases without full analysis as well. There's no point using a system like this for real-time processing if you can capture the stream for batch processing later. This system even removed some transformer layers to sacrifice accuracy for lower latency.

Basically, if anyone wanted to do surveillance like this, they were always doing it with public or secret implementations. This won't massively help anyone.

[hobofan]

Depending on what the desired level of "allowed exposure" is, manual reports + reviews can also work, without having up-front always-on live redaction of the audio feed.

E.g. while it's not perfect, Valorant's audio chats are a lot less toxic than many comparable FPS games via such a system. Of course that still won't protect you from one-off hearing slurs.

So that + elective client side filtering (if you really never want to experience profanity), seems like the best of both worlds.

[tsukikage]

> manual reports + reviews can also work

manual reports + reviews requires recording the feed for later review; real-time filtering does not. A number of other commenters have mentioned that being recorded bothers them; those folk should be arguing for the real-time AI moderator.

[viraptor]

I'm not sure how many people are interested in not hearing abuse -vs- not playing with abusive people. If someone called your name and then you heard bleeping, you know exactly what happened anyway. Is there actually a group of people happy with that result?