Microsoft’s CEO says Xbox ‘will have a catalog of games using generative AI’ – Video Games Chronicle
Satya Nadella thinks Xbox’s new generative AI model is “a massive moment of, ‘wow’Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said it’s planning to have a catalog of video games utilize its new generative AI mode, ‘Muse’.Announced earlier this week, Microsoft’s Muse is a generative AI model that it says can generate “game visuals, controller actions, or both.”In its announcement, Microsoft showed how Muse could generate game visuals using training data from Ninja Theory’s 2020 game Bleeding Edge.Commenting on Muse in an interview published this week, Nadella compared Muse to the ‘wow’ moment he said he felt when he first saw other generative AI models such as ChatGPT. According to Nadella, Microsoft is already planning to utilize generative AI in multiple games.“It’s just very cool… one thing that we wanted to go after was, using gameplay data, can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents and then are persistent to user mods, right? So that’s what this is,” he told the Dwarkesh Podcast.“The cool thing is what I’m excited about is bringing… we’re going to have a catalog of games soon that we will start using these models, or we’re going to train these models to generate, and then start playing them.“In fact, when Phil Spencer first showed it to me, where he had an Xbox controller and this model basically took the input and generated the output based on the input and it was consistent with the game.“And that to me is a massive, massive moment of, ‘wow’. It’s kind of like the first time we saw ChatGPT complete sentences or Dolly draw or Sora, this is kind of one such moment.”Like in most creative industries, Generative AI has become a hot topic in video games, with many voicing concerns about generative AI leading to job losses and widespread plagiarism.Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick recently said that not only does he think AI won’t lead to job losses, he believes it could lead to increased employment. He also said that he couldn’t think of any new guardrails that might be required to protect developers.Speaking to VGC, Split Fiction and It Takes Two director Josef Fares said he thinks developers should work with AI rather than push against it and called it “both scary and very exciting.”We sometimes publish affiliate links on VGC. For more information read our affiliate linking policy.@Andy_VGCAndy has worked in or around the games industry for 20 years across journalism and game development.Join the conversation!Already a patron? Click the button below to log in with Patreon. Not a member yet? Visit our Patreon page to become a patron and get access to community discussions and other exclusive benefits.AI slop like this will create nothing of value. I could get behind using generative AI as a tool to ease development, but this feels like a shortcut to mass-produce soulless games. Creativity and craftsmanship should lead game design, not algorithms regurgitating patterns.Training models to generate games and gameplay wholesale is nonsense that will only generate soulless, creatively bankrupt slop molded in the crude outline of a game. You only need to look at other prolific AI generated media- fiction, interactive chat, images, movies- to understand exactly how bland and hollow a generative AI video game experience would be.AI has utility as a tool in various aspects of game creation, mostly handling rote tasks, but that’s not the way Nadella is framing its role here. His pitch is that this is going to create new player actions, visuals, mods, etc, like it’s going to actively spin up and direct new experiences. Good luck with that. If that’s the future of games we’ll all going to find ourselves reminiscing about the good old days of the Ubisoft formula.I went and watched the Phil Spencer video where he’s talking about this technology, and he floats two potential use casees. Being able to port old games from defunct hardware using generative AI. And as a method to rapidly prototype game ideas. (I’m sure they’re aware of the potential backlash here so are treading carefully between exciting investors and not upsetting consumers)I think these are intellectually interesting ideas that are worth exploring. As with any tool, it can be used with postive or negative intent. I guess we’ll see if the positives in terms of supporting game development outweigh the negatives that might actually errode it. I’d like to think that the market won’t sustain low effort AI slop. But then, I look at some of the stuff my kids play in Roblox which are blatant low quality immitations of what I would consider “proper” games. So maybe there is a market for that?© 1981 Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.No part of this site or its content may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder.Website by 44 Bytes
