SpellTable—the best way to play tabletop Magic remotely—is adding a pilot program for enhanced moderation in an upcoming update to improve the experience of playing Magic against strangers on the internet.

In the past year, SpellTable has hit an inflection point where it needs more scalable moderation tools to let our team keep the platform a safe and fun way to play tabletop Magic remotely. As a voice and video platform, SpellTable has been challenging to moderate as it grows.

To help do that, we've given our team a new tool from ggwp.com that we're going to be trying out. It utilizes voice recording and artificial intelligence to highlight and alert speech that may be harmful and elevate it to our customer service team for review, and it has been used by other gaming companies to meaningfully reduce online harassment.

First, the tool uses AI to better sift through more data than our humans could reasonably process without help. You can read more about how the tool works on their website, ggwp.com. Importantly, we control how the tool is configured and used on SpellTable, including what it flags and how incidents are routed for human review. Note that our policy toward generative AI in Magic: The Gathering hasn't changed (you can read it here), and this tool is simply meant to help our team moderate effectively. And while we're looking at policy, note that any information collected through the tool will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable best practices, which you can read here.

Second, human moderators make the final decisions. AI is part of the workflow, but only to support our moderation and customer service teams, not replace them. These tools are designed to help them do their jobs more effectively and consistently—namely to make sure playing SpellTable is a fun, stress-free experience, even with strangers on the internet.

Finally, this is a pilot. Right now, our primary signal is manual player reports, and we know that relying on manual reports alone can miss issues. After launching this, we'll review flagged incidents and reports to assess how effective the tool is for our team, and we may adjust based on what we learn. We'll then decide whether and how to continue utilizing these tools.

Our main goal is to ensure that SpellTable remains an effective, safe, and above all fun way to play tabletop Magic remotely. We plan to be back with more updates on the effectiveness of our moderation tools as we learn more. Until then, thanks for being part of the gathering.