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[Arx]

I imagine that's an April fools thing. Or at least, parts of it seem likely to be.

[Caz]

I know it's a joke, but isn't this gonna be used as a technological way to mandate Orwell's newspeak?

Can't talk about things you no longer have a word for, yadda yadda

[ChairmanPoo]

I know it's a joke, but isn't this gonna be used as a technological way to mandate Orwell's newspeak?

Can't talk about things you no longer have a word for, yadda yadda

Two words: semantic change

[Kagus]

Ah, finally! A tool to protect me from hearing British people talk about cigarettes!

[methylatedspirit]

-snip-

I know it's a joke, but isn't this gonna be used as a technological way to mandate Orwell's newspeak?

Can't talk about things you no longer have a word for, yadda yadda

I'm gonna redefine swearing to include "saying bad things about Intel" for the sake of example. Just imagine some dystopian world where you're banned from criticizing Intel. I'll use the i9-11900K, since it's been the butt of jokes for PC enthusiasts since it first came out.

There's a million and one ways to say that the i9-11900K sucks, and people will find a way to say that it sucks. Compare it to AMD Bulldozer (which would end up censoring a competitor's product), compare it to Pentium 4 (or its revisions, especially Prescott), say it's a high-tech room heater, state that it's worse than its predecessor 9 times out of 10, joke that it's made on 14++++++++++nm, point out that it has 8 cores but priced similarly to a 12-core Ryzen, mention UserBenchMark (PSA: Do NOT use it; extreme Intel bias, to the point of conspiracy)...

There are a lot of insults you can throw at even a processor. You wanna try banning any of those without making it impossible to talk about computers? Imagine the creativity that could be unleashed if general obscenities were banned!

[hops]

The AI would realize that the only way to fully stop Intel slander is to drive humanity to extinction.

[WealthyRadish]

I think it should be said that the experience in a lot of the kind of "multiplayer games played solo" would probably be improved by this (assuming it doesn't actually bleep, and just cuts the audio). Many people, probably a majority, get fatigued by garbage on voice comms and write it off altogether while keeping everyone muted (and a feedback loop of nobody using them seriously develops as a result).

But it also needs to be said that the "opt-in", "end-user" experience thing is obviously horseshit; an insignificant number of people would willingly put this gross bloat on their machine, and Intel would never make money off it. The only way to profit would be licensing it to companies like Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and the owners of the largest multiplayer PC games, where there's no reason to believe it would be either "opt-in" or "opt-out" (or not just used to automatically ban/suspend people). They might also end up selling it to any government interested in mass-surveillance (not real-time censorship, that's dumb) which doesn't already have this in development (but if Intel can do it, any other tech company can, and the NSA almost certainly already has this cooking somewhere or already in use in select circumstances).

It's also questionable just in the sphere of video games. The drive for market share of these mindless corporations leads to taking every aspect of human life and transforming it into a commodity (an inferior substitute) that can be bought and sold exclusively on their terms, which ultimately means the terms of a monopoly or cartel catering to the widest market. The kinds of games that would be improved by this are basically antisocial experiences, thoroughly in line with the general trend of compartmentalizing existence into a miserable work-life relieved by a feed of entertainment that subtracts the remaining hours from the day. That this would just let them do one-half of that better (i.e. more profit, more consolidation, more barriers, with more people) doesn't really seem worthwhile.

[MrRoboto75]

A lot of game devs have been on a long quixotic journey to reduce the toxicity of their online video games.  It never really solves anything.

[dragdeler]

-

[martinuzz]

I really, really hate bleep censorship.
Too many good songs have been ruined by it.

It's also a very imperialistic thing. The extreme censoring of curse words and vulgar words is a USA thing, but their tech companies are forcing their censorship onto the world.

It's none of the USA's business if we want to use the words
(warning explicit language inside)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

fuck, anal or nigger

in the Netherlands or not.
We are perfectly well capable of moderating and civilizing our own debates, thank you.

[MrRoboto75]

that shall set the kind of incentive structure where assholes will wind up with nobody to play with

wasn't that already true pre-internet multiplayer?

[hector13]

Ah, finally! A tool to protect me from hearing British people talk about cigarettes!

Speech recognition software doesn’t work so good with British accents so you’ll still have to deal with it anyway.

[dragdeler]

-

[Mathel]

What is a swear and what is not changes a lot. The reason why some words are "bad" is that we acknowledge them a as such. For example, one of my friends started using "Corona" as a swear word.

But a more pressing problem could be overzealousness of such program. I know that in text, automatic censorship sometimes censors stuff it should not.

Either you will be forbidden from talking about beaches and beeches, or it will be easy to speak of female dogs.
Shitake mushrooms will be banned.

And that is just english. What if someone talks in a different language, with different curse words?

[martinuzz]

At some point, we'll end up in society where people have forgotten what the original n-word was and
n

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

ice things

will be
ba

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

nne

d


EDIT: hrmpf, why does a spoiler tag force a hard return