TechXbox can now make games using AI here's why that's a problemOPINION: Xbox training its AI model to help create gameplay sounds nifty, but it leads to a slippery slope that makes me fear for the future of the medium, and the artists withindailystarBookmarkShareTechByLloyd CoombesGaming Editor06:30, 21 FEB 2025BookmarkXbox's new AI-focused direction worries me (Image: Future via Getty Images)Whats 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, Id 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 Microsoft, the company that not so long ago laid off thousands of employees across multiple departments but many within its Xbox gaming division, now has an AI model that can create video game visuals and actions. The new model, called Muse (an irony that is not lost on me), was developed in coordination with Ninja Theory, and was supposedly trained not on its breakout hit Hellblade Senuas Saga or its sequel, but on the teams hero shooter Bleeding Edge which didnt last very long at all. Xbox is in a strange spot right now (Image: Getty Images) And thats where we are now. Were 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 biggest years in its gaming divisions history, this is how a trillion dollar company is choosing to push on. For goodness sakes, Avowed launched last week to barely any marketing, and it was great. If youre looking for a detailed rundown of the model, you can find that with nature, but Im 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 Microsofts admission, has been allowed to access seven years of human gameplay taken from Microsoft first-party games. And yet, its not all that surprising. While Microsoft says it wont 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? Its hard not to feel a little salty as our own industry (journalism) is fed into every LLM going. Phil Spencer is keen on the AI future, but I'm not so sure (Image: Getty Images) I really enjoyed Rock Paper Shotguns coverage 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, Microsofts 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 Googles pie for decades and now, theyre 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 isnt alone in this push one look at Wall Street will show you that AI will be running just about everything soon enough. This isnt me punching down on the use of AI in games, either. I was very vocal in my support of NVIDIAs 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. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said "Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron, theres no such thing. "Machine learning, machines dont 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 weve 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 wont reduce employment. I certainly hope hes right, because its starting to look more and more like games will be reduced to slop the same way my field has in the last couple of years, pilfering good and bad ideas alike to hit a quota for shareholders. For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters. Story SavedYou can find this story in My Bookmarks.Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right.More On