Your Video Games Will Never Be Fair Again

this video is brought to you by Incognito stick around here more about the special offer they are providing to the entire upper echelon Community alright people have been asking me for video game related topics and yes it feels like all I do lately is talk about AI but today I'd like to discuss the implications of an algorithm called YOLO V8 YOLO version 8 which is an

image recognition machine learning program which I believe will radically and abruptly begin changing the landscape of online competitive video games the truth is this video could have been made about two years ago I wasn't very quick on the draw here with this one but I remember seeing it back then Loosely covering it or rather looking into it for myself at least and thinking at least on

a personal level yeah this is going to cause a huge problem but Flash Forward today I think it's going to completely redefine what it means to play even a competitive video game in particular first person shooters because the danger here isn't that AI will somehow outright exterminate us at least not soon the danger is that AI will just surpass Us in every conceivable way thereby destroying

based on the evidence I see all around me here we go what is YOLO YOLO is a pop culture term meaning you only live once but it's also a moniker for the you only live once image detection algorithm developed by Joseph Redmond and Ali farhadi at the University of Washington in 2015. the program itself has been through multiple different iterations version 2 and 2016 version 3

in 2018 V4 and 2020 V6 in 2022 and now we're on version 8 which is basically just a couple weeks old at this point YOLO is an interesting name and an interesting program but it's probably best for me to just play it on screen this is what it does in essence YOLO is just an object identification and tracking tool but the implications of that in a

world of modern video games are catastrophic it doesn't really hit home just what this will and already does mean in gaming when the tech is being used on traffic footage for example so here it is on Counter-Strike or here it is maybe on valorent or even for a slightly different demonstration here it is on a regular football game now of course this technology has a multitude

of positive applications as well it can be used in the medical industry weather prediction content analysis of all kinds even in law enforcement actually whether or not you see that as a positive is entirely up to you I'm not here to say how you should feel about the world of surveillance getting a massive upgrade right now but you get the point the tech itself is obviously

just a tool some applications will be positive some negative but the implications for gaming in particular in my opinion are nothing short of catastrophic today's video sponsor is incogni heartfelt message here lately I've really struggled with a shift in methodology I only want to work with brands that respect me as a Creator and allow me true creative and verbal Freedom incognate owned by the same company

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again link down below and promo code Echelon for the first 100 viewers who use it to get 60 off their subscription big thank you to incogni for embracing my freedom and sponsoring the channel so where do we start in order to fully and completely understand what this will mean for Competitive Gaming my opinion we should start here this is or was rather a website created by

user 101 called user vision and user vision is basically patient zero for an Unstoppable digital cheating epidemic user Vision was originally being sold for Call of Duty in particular and this is what it did advertised as any platform in undetectable anytime anywhere user vision would identify targets with machine learning and eliminate them with video game controls that sounds good but what could possibly separate this from

a multitude of existing cheat engines that do that and have done that for a very long time and why on Earth should anyone care about it simply put these cheats fundamentally really are undetectable they can be detected in some circumstances very Niche circumstances mainly if the individual using them is irresponsible enough to to dial them up to the nth degree a strength that is outside the

bounds of actual human potential really is what it is but what if someone were smart enough not to do that spoiler alert they are they have been I've talked to a couple of them who have done it and they will continue to be with increasingly frequent occurrence here's what I mean by that and I'll try to go fast because this part is sort of boring but

necessary to understand the topic average human response times as per human benchmark.com which has apparently recorded over 81 million Reaction Time clicks if you listen to them is roughly between 270 and 290 milliseconds seen here and graphed on a bell curve slow end reaction times are in the low 300s and fast reaction times are in the 160s and 170s even better when particularly examining the world

of Esports which is relevant for today's topic research from Ohio Northern University suggests with a documented set of methods that Esports players possess a reaction time roughly between 160 and 180 milliseconds for certain tests as low as 140 in some cases varying by test type of course and that's fast very very fast but equally as important as the average is the underlying extreme some people whether

by training persistence or some kind of genetic superiority even are able to have a reaction time that borders on 100 milliseconds it's an incredibly small number of people but there are human beings out there and Esports players in particular that can achieve something like 120 millisecond reaction times or even 115 110. again this is an incredibly difficult thing to do often requiring the most advanced Hardware

a person can buy in addition to physical dexterity but it's certainly possible and therein lies the problem the difference between average and Esports in gaming in particular is Monumental it's measured in the form of milliseconds but don't let that fool you because it's really the difference between winning and losing highly competitive first-person shooters as well as other game types many of them but Shooters are obviously

the most immediately threatened video game genre demand almost perfect reaction times and shot placement from users in order to achieve Victory under those win conditions skill matters but the difference between an average player and a competitive professional player is Extreme the difference is actually so large that an average player in say gold division or silver division or God forbid bronze division for any given shooter will

likely never beat a challenger tier or a champion tier or Grand Master tier player whatever it is the game decides to call them even one percent of the time and this is of course a function of many separate superiority benchmarks like memorization of the maps positioning Etc kit knowledge all these different things but one of the most important arguably probably the most important aiming and reaction

time with that out of the way what's the connection though well we've already shown the connection because it's user Vision using an image recognition algorithm whether it was a specific version of YOLO or something else I'm not really sure user Vision was able to identify targets track shoot and kill them on any device in an undetectable way the method used here is also pretty simple and

only requires about 200 US dollars at the moment of making this video the gist of it without turning this video into a guide of sorts which would only exacerbate the problem the gist of it is that users can pipe their gameplay through a capture card use a secondary computer and then route input commands through something like a Titan 2. this makes it so that input commands

originating from an AI such as aiming or shooting at targets that resemble enemies appears to be coming from an HID maybe a controller also known as a human interface device in no uncertain terms this makes them either impossible or nearly impossible to detect on a hardware level which leaves a singular mechanism of detecting the cheats through unrealistic results detailed in R's Technica a while ago Riot

games in particular responded to this Threat by emphasizing that superhuman Feats are a dead giveaway no Sherlock and that a joint program of artificial and human detection methods have let them continue to enforce fair play in valorin of course they'll say that our game is fair despite the existence of what R in essence functionally undetectable cheats that's all well and good but let's get a better

grasp of how the problem has grown similar to to a viral outbreak the issues begin with patient zero and then they spread for today patient zero is user 101 I don't know if that's the actual patient zero for this kind of thing but it's definitely one of the more well-known instances where it cropped up and then some other things happen but we'll get to that in

a minute given the nature of the problem and the sheer amount of money at stake here the problem wasn't exactly flying under the radar Activision Blizzard the publisher behind Call of Duty which is one of the most valuable Entertainment Properties in human history almost immediately became aware that user Vision had cropped up leading to decisive and immediate action Activision Blizzard in the grand scheme of legality

and Court proceedings acted with lightning speed I want to stress this proportional to how they react to other things in the business world this was the equivalent of a blitz a stomp out as fast as they could they acted with as much force as they could to shut the website down that was Distributing user Vision in place of the actual cheats themselves suddenly there was an

apology and then eventually there was nothing Activision Blizzard acted incredibly fast again as we've said but much like a dangerous pathogen the spread could not be fully contained if you browse the internet now there are innumerable guides walkthroughs and Technical explanations of exactly what this is exactly how to do it so that anyone could probably set it up how to train the imaging software yourself explicitly

how to replicate the effects in almost any comparable video game and more the truth of the matter is people are using this now more of them are using it every single day and the companies behind the games that they target are incapable of controlling the problem in essence this is the death of public matchmaking competitive fairness and I know that's a super dramatic thing to say

I get that people accuse me of being hyperbolic all the time but think about it and really do please think about it if these cheats are truly undetectable which I pause it that they are if a player does not dial them up to an inhuman level and therefore remains beneath the radar it would mean that anyone using them can reframe their current reaction time to a

near perfect 140-ish milliseconds AKA they can jump to a competitive Esports tier undetectably for couple hundred dollars that destroys the very fabric of legitimate competition if all you have to do is control where the character runs as a secondary computer undetectively mows down targets with the speed and efficiency of a professional gamer the standard of play naturally starts to rise matches you would have won because

you were just superior to the other player become losses as the number of players using undetectable machine learning increases meaning that more and more you will be playing against machines not people who are better than they should be through the augmentation and kind of the meshed skill set of machine learning and human control not good enough to get caught mind you just good enough to start

winning more games if they dialed it up all the way they would crush everyone in their path as is true already with most cheat engines but that right there is how AI will destroy the things we love and we're kind of just sitting here defending it think about it the only way to beat that is to have highly highly invasive anti-cheat because you need to detect

the problem before you can ever solve it you need access to not only a person's entire machine but also any connected hid devices just to detect if these types of cheating methods are even being used in any number of the other devices connected to your computer that level of infiltration however comes with very large security risks and drawbacks and performance problems most likely and baggage I

would propose in my opinion that Activision Blizzard knew this they understood the danger and they reacted accordingly as fast as they could but the damage is already done YOLO exists with more advanced versions being released at progressively shortening intervals the mechanisms needed to plug it into games and train it at home yourself with nothing but a laptop are out there and every single day they get

more and more popular video game companies pretend that they can detect these problems or fight back against them and maybe right now they can to a degree but we are currently staring down the barrel of a problem where the weapon has been invented before the protection in this case the weapon hasn't even been invented it's been progressively refined into a consumer level cheap and well-oiled machine

spreading further every day while the tools to fight back and create a truly Level Playing Field just don't exist and no one even knows how to make them AI isn't going to wipe us out at least not yet it just might destroy the things we love instead of logging into a game you're pretty good at and getting a triple kill you'll be logging into an instance

of AI controlled pseudo-humans where the human player exists in the most minimal capacity possible which then emulates a nearly Benchmark perfect example of human performance far outpacing the abilities of an average player and if they go too far yeah they will get banned there will be detection on that level and people will always take it too far dialing the program up to its maximum potential would

obviously surpass anything even remotely achievable by humans but not everyone is that stupid plenty of people out there have already begun using this and will continue to do so for that matter making it harder and harder for legitimate players to compete and sure there might be a solution when it comes to invasive anti-cheat but that's a trade-off by itself and one that none of us should

ever take lightly or probably even have to make but we do bottom line your video games will never be fair again at least most of them that ship already sailed it's just just a matter of how well the Publishers can fight back and how far the problem will actually spread I know I always Trend towards hyper dramatic Doomer topics and maybe all of this is completely

unfounded maybe I'm a nutcase and the fear is completely irrational it's going to usher in a grand Utopia but I find myself concerned about the very fabric of Competitive Gaming right now because the desire by humans to replace their own abilities with computerized Perfection is an unchecked rapidly emerging threat that will continue to grow and will have serious consequences for a large number of Industries it's

a lot to think about I know but that's it quick update for the most loyal viewers and this is one of the parts of the video that I'm most excited about there has been an improvement to the video bounties I'm not calling them subliminal frame giveaways anymore that's evolved I'm calling them bounties and this one for today is hidden in three different parts this modification is

part of a broader initiative to increase watch time on the channel because just listening to it I'm pretty sure punishes me in the YouTube algorithm like I need people to watch the content and be scrolling through it I mean I'm trying to I'm trying to make the channel more popular here just bear with me so it's part of a broader initiative to increase watch time that

benefits me while providing entertainment and excitement to viewers and it's being programmed by sick or sick the cat on GitHub all of his information is linked down below I've worked with him on a variety of topics he's helped Elevate the quality of the channel of the videos that I produce on the channel and it's just it's really fun right now we're having a lot of fun

doing this he's gone above and beyond to make this entire project a reality so please do go check out his work and understand that he's the architect here I'm helping of course with the The Hiding of the keys and all these different things but anyway just if you want to there are three different hidden decryption codes you find them in the video they're hidden somewhere in

the video go to the GitHub repo which is linked down below at the very bottom of the description do what it says there I mean some of it's you know you have to do some work it'll spit out a real code and that code can be redeemed well same as last time I won't hide that that's an Amazon gift code the last one was 250 and

it was comparatively quite easy this one is way way harder but also way more fun for people that care to dissipate in a sort of upper echelon ARG in the making and so it's slightly more it's not a bunch more but it's more other links down below as well merch social media the video sponsor of course some YouTube Alternatives locals and patreon support there is very

much appreciated also Channel memberships I mean that's something that YouTube provides and I get much more from that than I do from ad Revenue so anyway a bunch of ways that you can pay for it and some of that is going to go back into this ARG concept that we're building out but whatever I'll cut it there more projects coming soon in the future no more

rambling as always thank you all for watching and have a nice night [Music]