In brief
- Roblox’s new AI-powered feature rewrites profanity in chat instead of replacing messages with “####.”
- The system aims to keep conversations readable during gameplay while enforcing Roblox’s community standards.
- The company is also upgrading its chat filters to detect profanity and attempts to gain players’ personal information.
The massively popular online gaming platform, Roblox, is replacing the strings of hashmarks that appear when its chat filters catch profanity with AI-rephrased versions of flagged messages, the company announced on Thursday.
The feature, called real-time chat rephrasing, modifies profanity in messages so conversations remain readable instead of appearing as blocked text.
“For example, a message that violates Roblox’s profanity policies, such as ‘Hurry TF up!’ would previously have appeared as ‘####’ within experience chat,” the company said. “That will now be rephrased to ‘Hurry up!’”
This new design, according to Roblox Vice President of User and Discovery Product Rajiv Bhatia, aims to maintain civility by rephrasing the language and replacing “stop signs” with actual words.
“Chat is central to how people connect, coordinate, and play on Roblox,” Bhatia said in a statement. “Real-time rephrasing helps keep gameplay and conversations on track while guiding language toward what’s appropriate.”
In May 2025, Roblox introduced real-time warnings that alert users when messages may violate platform rules, and encourage them to reconsider their wording.
“In experiments last year, Roblox saw that issuing in-experience text chat notifications and time-outs resulted in a 5% reduction in filtered chat messages and a 6% reduction in consequences from abuse reports,” the company said.
Despite the drop, Roblox said the new change addresses a long-standing issue where filtered language appears as strings of random characters, which can make chats difficult to follow during gameplay.
While players in the chat are notified when text is rephrased, the company says the new system does not alter its enforcement policies for profanity.
“To be clear, when we rephrase a message that violates our profanity policy, it is still a violation, and the same rules still apply,” Bhatia said in a separate statement on Thursday. “A user who continues to try to curse in chat will still face the same consequences for repeatedly violating our policy.”
The rephrasing feature, Roblox said, is available only in chats between age-verified users in similar age groups, and supports all languages currently available through Roblox’s automatic translation tools. To get a handle on how teen players talk during gameplay, Roblox said the new rephrasing feature was developed in collaboration with members of its Teen Council.
The company is also upgrading its text filtering system to better detect attempts to evade moderation rules, including variations of language that substitute numbers or symbols for letters, known as leetspeak.
Roblox’s chat rephrasing is part of a growing trend in the gaming industry, with companies increasingly using AI to moderate player behavior in multiplayer games. In 2024, Activision said more than 2 million accounts were flagged for disruptive chats after deploying its AI-powered ToxMod moderation system across several Call of Duty titles. The company said the tool helped reduce repeat offenders and cut severe instances of disruptive voice chat.
Roblox has also expanded its own use of AI across the platform. In February 2024, the company introduced real-time AI chat translation that allows players to communicate across more than 16 languages in Roblox chat.
“This is a bold new approach, and we won’t always rephrase things perfectly,” Bhatia said of the latest move, adding that the company will continue to learn and experiment with the feature. “Our ultimate goal is to empower users to collaborate and connect in a way that is both fun and respectful.”
Roblox did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.
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