Artificial Intelligence Gets 20.000 CS:GO Players Banned

Killer robots and other apocalyptic AI systems might be a thing of the future or perhaps a pure SF element of human imagination. However, until we get to the distant future, we’ve got some other applications of artificial intelligence that have already produced results. More specifically, some 20.000 CS:GO players got banned in six weeks because a new chat AI system called Minerva has found them guilty of breaking certain rules of conduct.

In addition to banning all of these players, Minerva issued 90.000 warnings and marked 7 million messages as toxic. So as you can imagine, only the ones that persisted in their actions succeded in getting banned. Which is a general lesson for life too.

“Who’s responsible?” – Sarah Connor, “Terminator 2”

FACEIT and Google Working Together

The companies responsible for this purge are FACEIT and Google. Together, they’ve developed a new way of detecting spammers and flamers that use FACEIT to play CS:GO and decided to terminate them (I mean their accounts) if they don’t behave. If you think China may have gone too far with their social credit system, just get a load of this.

Impact of This Experiment

During the 6-week trial, in the months of August and September, when FACEIT has employed this latest chat AI system, the number of toxic CS:GO messages dropped by 20% while the number of unique players sending such messages dropped by 8%.

Future Implications

The implications for the world of CS:GO are massive. Today it’s FACEIT who does this. Tomorrow might be Valve itself. As you probably know, CS:GO and esports, in general, is an international activity. And as a result, you get to learn new languages, just because you have to.

Well, with Minerva watching people 24/7, a lot of kids will no longer get to learn any Russian or at least the basic curse phrases used in English. From now on, they’ll have to curse in their own language when they get angry and as a result, the world has lost a wonderful means of expression that had been previously shared by everyone. Just imagine telling someone from France “Rush B cyka!” in 2050 without them having any idea what you meant.

I guess one of the big questions regarding this system is the following: if the community doesn’t give up on their standard approach (i.e. flame everybody all the time), how much will FACEIT be willing to lose users of their platform in favor of helping young people assimilate all those lessons they didn’t learn from their moms?