CS:GO’s Toxicity-Busting Minerva Chat AI Banned 20,000 Players in Just One Month

[Tsing]

Artificial intelligence appears to be making headway in ensuring that the online multiplayer experience is a heavily sanitized one. Within its first weeks, FACEIT and Google's Minerva AI banned 20,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players after analyzing over 200,000,000 chat messages and deeming 7,000,000 of those to be "toxic." Toxic language has reportedly been reduced by as much as 20% since the AI's incorporation.

“If a message is perceived as toxic in the context of the conversation,” FACEIT explains in a blog post, “Minerva issues a warning for verbal abuse, while similar messages in a chat are flagged as spam. Minerva is able to take a decision just a few seconds after a match has ended: if an abuse is detected it sends a notification containing a warning or ban to the abuser.”

 

[Grimlakin]

You know what... we could do with less toxicity in games like that. Hell in gaming in general. But we all know this will just move the verbal toxicity to Discord instead.

 

[ThreeDee]

I used be a moderator on Thinking-man.net's CS servers years ago. We tried to provide a family friendly gaming environment so you kids could come and kill other virtual terrorist/counter terrorists without the "toxicity" .. swearing, etc .. whether in chat or over the mic.. didn't allow "sprays" either. I've seen a lot of stuff that still haunts my thoughts sprayed onto random walls in CS and TF2 ...

I'm all for cleaning up on public servers where you know there are a plethora of 10 year olds unfortunately hearing, seeing and ultimately engaging in stuff that even consenting adults should be ashamed of ...

 

[Zarathustra]

I managed a few high profile CS servers in the early CS days when I was in college.

I had my servers in the main IT building where traffic was shaped to both allow good on-campus and off-campus performance.

We kept a pretty good close-knit community in large part because mass Napster use made gaming outside campus nearly impossible for most people, so if you were banned from my servers, you were banned from CS

Things have become so much nastier since then.

They need this technology to work with voice chats as well.