Developer Roblox Corporation recently introduced a new face-scanning feature as a way to increase child safety protection on its game creation platform, Roblox. CEO David Baszucki is very excited about this initiative, giving some rather intense and questionable answers during a new podcast episode about the age-gating technology.
Baszucki sat down with The New York Times journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose for an episode of their Hard Fork podcast. Posted on November 21, the three engaged in a wide-ranging conversation that started with the face-scanning feature, moved to misnomers about data, and peaked at disgreements regarding the use of AI for moderation. Newtown opened with an inquiry about the problem with predators on Roblox, which Baszucki said is a good and bad dilemma.
“We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well,” he said. “How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were–this was almost 18 or 19 years ago–when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time.”
