AI Voice Moderator GGWP Disappointed That Gamers Don’t Make Small Talk
San Francisco, CA — CEO Dennis “Thresh” Fong said today in a private statement that he and his coworkers at AI voice moderation company GGWP are “disappointed” that, as their data shows, gamers evidently do not make small talk.
“It’s really frustrating, from a monetary perspective,” said Fong. “I mean, yes, it’s true that we are an AI startup in California. And yes, we got a 33 million dollar investment from Riot Games and Sony. And we are already paid by our corporate partners, like our most recent collaborator, Spelltable. But that’s not really where any of our money comes from. It mostly comes from selling your personal data to advertisers, and we can’t actually do that if you losers never talk about anything but the game.”
GGWP (an acronym that this reporter will continue to capitalize despite the fact that its ugly corporate logo uses all lower-case letters) is not so dissimilar from similar such companies that its main revenue stream is anything other than selling your personal data to the highest bidder. Therefore, they are admittedly upset to learn that rather than listening in on non-game conversations that may give advertisers clues about how to target their marketing, the conversations they record are almost exclusively related to the game itself.
“I’m tired of hearing about how bot lane is feeding,” sighs an anonymous human reviewer whose sole purpose is to ‘double-check’ the AI so that the company can say its moderation decisions don’t come exclusively from large language models, even though they functionally might as well. “I am ostensibly looking for things to ban people over, sure. But I’m also looking for information we can send to Google, or to data brokers. I wanna know what people ate today, where they work, what else they do for fun, anything we can use. Instead? It’s just ‘why isn’t Yi ganking’ or people yelling slurs.”
Gamers themselves, however, are significantly less surprised by these woes.
“Small talk? You think any of us have lives?” scoffs gamer Xx_booty-ass_xX. “Nah, dude. If we had lives, we would not be using voice chat in League of Legends. Be for real.” The player had no further comment, as this reporter had to queue Ranked with him in order to have the interview at all, and obtained that quote while loading in. After that, he only spoke to heavily criticize my Vayne play the moment I missed a single CS.
GGWP may be attempting to break outside of their League origins for this reason. But given the fact that its CEO’s alleged nickname (which we at the Commander’s Herald are sure all his friends definitely call him) is the name of a support champion in League of Legends, such origins may be difficult to shake. One can still see the theoretical appeal of seeking out Magic players via a partnership over Spelltable, but even players there are skeptical.
“I mean, I wouldn’t say I have no life, I’d just say that I don’t really make small talk during games because that’s not what anyone’s here for,” says an anonymous Magic player. “I have a buddy from high school who used to play kitchen table Magic with me all the time. But we went to different colleges, and have kept up with it using Spelltable once a month or so. Last year he got married and I didn’t even hear about it until I was bored enough to open Instagram the other day. Best friend I ever had.”
