(The developers choose how long Modulate keeps the recordings, which are stored on Modulate’s servers.) Players can dispute a decision, and developers can then ask Modulate for a recording of the audio in question. The report flows to a live queue monitored by the game’s moderation team, and those people then issue a final verdict, doling out temporary or permanent bans. “They’re able to say, ‘If I only have five minutes, I'm going to spend that five minutes on the worst of the worst stuff happening on this platform,’” Pappas said. The organization allows developers to triage a situation if they find themselves overwhelmed. These instances can be tagged with categories like threatening language, bullying, or racism. It prepares a detailed transcript of the conversation between players, grading the interaction severity scale determined by developers. “If for whatever reason, you're having an academic conversation about how people are using that slur, then we are going to notice that the emotional and behavioral characteristics don't indicate harm.” Once ToxMod identifies what it thinks is toxic behavior, an “automated analysis” phase begins. “If you say a homophobic slur, that doesn't mean for sure that we're going to tag you,” he said. The software can monitor English, Spanish and 16 other languages, distinguishing between good-natured trash talk and a problematic screaming match, Pappas said, and is intelligent enough to parse a conversation’s context, examining “the emotion and the volume of how things are being spoken …Are people interrupting each other a lot? Is there someone who just joined the conversation, said one sentence and everyone went eerily quiet?” Its prices range from a $2,000 flat fee for small developers to as much as $20,000 a month for medium-size ones-with big studios and publishers like Activision negotiating custom deals, the specifics of which Modulate wouldn’t discuss. The refocus led them to their moderation software, ToxMod, which they began selling in 2021. “We ended up taking a lot of that core technology and reorienting it to focus more on detecting that harmful behavior so that we can actually do something about the folks being hostile.” “We realized we don't want our solution to be telling victims they need to hide, we want our solution to be attacking the problem at its root,” Pappas said. Soon, he and Huffman recognized a fatal flaw in their plan. Initially, when he cofounded Modulate with his MIT classmate Carter Huffman in 2015, the duo envisioned creating software that would allow players to mask their voices, hoping to provide some cover to players who felt their voices made them targets for harassment. It’s an impressive reach for Pappas considering it’s not what he originally set out to do. In August, the company received an even more prominent stamp of approval when Activision’s blockbuster Call of Duty franchise added ToxMod to its latest entry Modern Warfare 2, the fourth best-selling game of 2023, according to Mat Piscatella, an executive director at Circana, the market research firm formerly known as the NPD Group. Alexis Miller, director of product management at the studio behind Among Us VR, Schell Games, is pleased with the results: After deploying ToxMod, “we saw an immediate drop in the number of utterances that were flagged as toxic”-as players realized they’d be flagged for bad behavior-“and it has never risen back to that level.” In the last two years, games like Among Us VR and Rec Room, as well as publishers like Riot Games, the team behind games like League of Legends and Valorant, have signed on as customers. Still, Modulate has raised $30 million in venture funding and several major developers have rushed to add its software to their titles. Netanyahu Wants Elon Musk to Help Boost Artificial Intelligence in Israel.This Artificial Intelligence Tool Can ‘Hear’ The Health of a Forest.Mis-Regulating Artificial Intelligence Could Be Highly Hazardous.Instagram Has a Tom Hanks-Size Problem With Artificial Intelligence.Artificial Intelligence: The Next Climate Wildfire?.The Age of Artificial Intelligence Calls for ‘Digital Artisans’.
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