EA patent proposes AI system to punish you for fraternising with the enemy

Like a stern, cigar-chomping basic, EA has grown bored with its gamers befriending their enemies, and has give you a technique to cease it. A brand new patent from the corporate, titled “Detecting Collusion in On-line Video games,” is supposed to catch gamers on opposing groups who unfairly companion up earlier than they’ll smash the game for everybody else.

Noticed by Exputer, the system would utilise an AI to sift via a wealth of participant information and make judgments about whether or not their in-game behaviour constitutes collusion or not. That is not simply in-game information, both, every thing EA has on you’ll be honest game. If you happen to and an opponent share a guild in one other EA game, have exchanged chat messages up to now, or even when you understand one another on social media accounts you’ve got linked to the game, it might all get factored into the system’s decision-making course of.

If an evaluation of a participant’s out-of-game information and in-game information (which incorporates each their behaviour within the match being analysed and their historic matches) suggests one thing up, then it is time for punishment. In contrast to the discomfiting AI-based surveillance of the detection system, the proposed punishments are all normal fare, and embody being “faraway from the match, disqualified from rewards, suspended, banned and so forth”.

EA says punishments may very well be computerized or could observe a “a human or algorithmic evaluation” of the collusion-detection system’s output, which seems like fairly a serious choice to be undecided about. The entire thing already seems like a privateness minefield with a serious potential for error: I am unsure eradicating people from the equation solely would make me really feel significantly better about taking part in a game utilizing this type of tech.

In fact, it is necessary to keep in mind that that is only a patent for now, and firms commonly churn out patents for methods and applied sciences they by no means find yourself utilizing. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to see where EA’s head is at nowadays. One other current patent from the corporate proposed algorithmically adjusting game difficulty based mostly on how nicely (or awfully) you performed. Somebody over at EA headquarters has a bee of their bonnet about AI, apparently, and it is most likely a matter of time earlier than algorithmic tech like this slips off the patent web page and into EA’s video games.