Ubisoft and Riot partner to create AI to counter toxic text chats

In the continued pursuit of a reduction in toxic behavior in Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft has partnered with fellow video game giant Riot Games to target abusive text chat messages. Riot Games are the developers of League of Legends and Valorant. 

According to The Verge, the partnership will aim to produce an AI which will be able to process and understand the meaning of each text chat message in the context of the conversation. This will allow abusive and toxic messages to be filtered out and decreases the reliance on simply banning individual words, a method which is fairly simple to circumvent. 

Before the work gets started on the language processing, though, Riot and Ubisoft will first work together to “create a framework that lets them share, collect, and tag data in a privacy-protecting way” said Ubisoft La Forge’s executive director in an interview with The Verge. 

Ubisoft La Forge is effectively the research arm of Ubisoft which will be involved in the partnership.

This announcement comes just two months after Tencent -- the owners of Riot Games -- also invested $297,000,000 into Ubisoft to acquire a minority stake in the company. Now, both companies are working together for the first time to combat a common issue, toxicity. 

Ubisoft previously has also worked with Destiny 2’s developers, Bungie, on lawsuits against cheat makers with mixed success.

Even if a framework can be worked out between the two companies, though, the AI’s creation and implementation is a long way off even within the two companies' scope. The two partners will “share the learnings of the initial phase of the experiment” in 2023.

This all comes nine months on from the announcements at the annual Ubisoft Developers Conference (which takes place every year in Montreal following the Six Invitational) that Ubisoft La Forge would be expanding in Canada, China, and France, which included a new team at Ubisoft Montreal, where Rainbow Six is made. La Forge initially came from the Montreal studio itself and now the team may get to work with their colleagues a few doors over to make Rainbow Six Siege a more enjoyable game to play.