Xbox can now make games using AI – here's why that's a problem

What’s your favourite game in the world? Or your favourite piece of music, or movie? Whatever the answer, and for whatever reason that piece of art stands alone in your mind, I’d wager it has something to do with painstaking commitment from the artist, be they developers, musicians, directors, actors, or anything else. I mention this because , the company that not so long ago laid off thousands of employees across multiple departments but many within its gaming division, now has an AI model that can create ‘video game visuals and actions’. The new model, called ‘ ’ (an irony that is not lost on me), was developed in coordination with Ninja Theory, and was supposedly trained not on its breakout hit but on the team’s hero shooter Bleeding Edge which didn’t last very long at all.

And that’s where we are now. We’re at a point where, despite owning studios responsible for Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Dishonored, Halo, Gears of War, and even Crash bloody Bandicoot, Microsoft is cutting out the middle of the process and research ways to develop games without any of the artistry. In a world where Sony is shooting itself in the foot with a focus on “games as a service” titles, and Microsoft is gearing up for one of the , is how a trillion dollar company is choosing to push on.



For goodness sakes, launched last week to barely any marketing, and it was great. If you’re looking for a detailed rundown of the model, you can find that with , but I’m far more concerned about what the ramifications are. The idea is that, by feeding a snippet of gameplay, it can generate follow-up frames as it sees fit.

And yet, Muse does not inspire confidence because it itself is inspired by the works of others. Bleeding Edge was certainly ‘a game of our time’, but the team at Ninja Theory crafted it themselves — likely not to be bastardised into a machine that, by Microsoft’s admission, has been allowed to access seven years of human gameplay taken from Microsoft first-party games. And yet, it’s not all that surprising.

While Microsoft says it won’t be used to replace developers, the proof will be in the pudding, so to speak. The company laid off a huge number of employees last year, closing entire studios, and now this? It’s hard not to feel a little salty as our own industry (journalism) is fed into every LLM going. I really enjoyed of Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer chatting to the XboxEra podcast recently.

While Spencer bemoans the way writers, like yours truly, have to make keyword soup to be recognised by search engines like, say, Microsoft’s own Bing, RPS' News Editor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell puts it better than I ever could: “PHIL! Phil. I too miss the days when people paid for video games journalism, regularly or irregularly. I too dislike writing headlines such as What Is Doom: The Dark Skyrim For Fortnite Fans Free Horses Fast.

But Phil, this is the equivalent of the high school bully asking us why we are hitting ourselves. Your company makes billions from Search!” “Those “friends in the industry” you allude to have been trying to steal Google’s pie for decades and now, they’re devising software that turns searching for websites into a process of auto-regurgitating cliffnotes from those websites and cutting off whatever ad revenue we have!” There is nothing you could do to convince me a game built by AI can rival anything handcrafted by humans, and I acknowledge that Microsoft isn’t alone in this push — one look at Wall Street will show you that AI will be running just about everything soon enough. This isn’t me punching down on the use of AI in games, either.

I was very vocal in my support of NVIDIA’s DLSS tech which generates additional frames on PC, and I can see how it makes for better games in use cases like helping generate more realistic faces in the likes of EA FC. , Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said "Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron, there’s no such thing. "Machine learning, machines don’t learn.

Those are convenient ways to explain to human beings what looks like magic,' he continued. “The bottom line is that these are digital tools and we’ve used digital tools forever. I have no doubt that what is considered AI today will help make our business more efficient and help us do better work, but it won’t reduce employment.

” I certainly hope he’s right, because it’s starting to look more and more like games will be the same way my field has in the last couple of years, pilfering good and bad ideas alike to hit a quota for shareholders..