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The people who operate bots in Valve’s multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2, and that many members of the community say have effectively ruined the game, have used AI to clone the voice of and defame a YouTuber who has been criticizing them.
“Someone decided to train an AI on my YouTube videos, allowing them to make any audio they recorded of themselves sound like I had said it,” Megascatterbomb, the YouTuber who’s been trying to bring attention to the botting problem, said in a video shared on YouTube in an effort to highlight the retaliation he’s faced. “If you recall me saying some of the most vile and hateful things imaginable over the mic; that was a bot, not me.”
Team Fortress 2 was first released in 2007 and back then was one of Valve’s crown jewels alongside Counter-Strike, Half-Life, and Portal. It also became a pioneer in the then emerging practice of microtransactions in video games, introducing cosmetic items that players could earn, buy, or trade with other players, which is now common in games and especially on Valve’s Steam platform. Valve supported Team Fortress 2 for years, and in some ways still does, but in recent years players have seen a spike in cheating and botting that Valve has allowed to run wild.