Maker of machine learning cheat says "my intent was never to do anything illegal" after Activision clampdown

The maker of a machine learning cheat that hit the headlines last week has insisted “my intent was never to do anything illegal” after Activision stepped in to shut development down.

The creator of the cheat, who goes by the name “USER101”, has slapped a statement on the website for User Vision Pro, which Activision took steps to scrub from the internet after console competitive multiplayer fans expressed concern about its potential to ruin games.

A new version of existing cheat User Vision Pro was set to use machine learning to analyse gameplay footage in real-time before sending inputs to a controller.

The platform agnostic cheat would have required hardware to use – that is, a PC and a capture card. The idea was the capture card would send your gameplay to a PC in realtime for the machine learning cheat to analyse and deliver input commands back to a controller in response.

This was not an aimbot or wallhack in the traditional sense. Rather, the cheat would have only reacted to what was shown on-screen, leaving the user to aim in the general direction of the enemy in order to benefit.

In Warzone, for example, typical aimbots see the cheater “snap” to targets hundreds of meters away, even those hidden behind cover or in the gas and therefore invisible to the naked eye.

Still, there was concern this cheat would have threatened the so far relatively secure competitive console landscape, with some in the Call of Duty community particularly worried because of the focus on Activision’s shooter in promotional videos for User Vision Pro.