This week Microsoft (technically Microsoft Research Game Intelligence and Teachable AI Experiences teams) announced Microsoft Muse, a generative AI model designed for AI ideation. What the heck does that mean? Well, its very similar to Googles GameNGen which created a somewhat recreated version of Doom by having an AI play the game over and over again, then rendering a dynamic result based on the users input. With Microsoft MUSE they worked with Ninja Theory using their 2020 XBox game Bleeding Edge, both using gameplay footage and controller input data.As part of this process they created WHAM, the World Human Action Model as well as the WHAM Demonstrator which allows users to interface with the data model. At this point you may be asking yourself a very important question why?Today, our team is excited to be publishing our work in Nature and simultaneously releasing Muse open weights, the WHAM Demonstrator, and sample data to the community.I look forward to seeing the many ways in which the community will explore these models and build on our research. I cannot wait to see all the ways that these models and subsequent research will help shape and increase our understanding of how generative AI models of human gameplay may support gameplay ideation and pave the way for future, novel, AI-based game experiences, including the use cases that ourcolleagues at Xbox(opens in new tab)have already started to explore.One use case that Xbox head Phil Spencer (in this reveal video) suggested was gameplay preservation:You could imagine a world where, from gameplay data and video, a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run, I feel thats really exciting.In a Eurogamer article, AI expert Dr Michael Cook responded accordingly:Bluntly, Cook calls Spencers comments idiotic.I mean, in a sense anything is a preservation tool, Cook writes. I could ask my friends five-year-old son to draw a crayon picture of what he thinks the ending cutscene ofFinal Fantasy 8looks like and that would still count as game preservation of a certain sort.Despite a decade of AI growth, Cook says, theres no method yet to measure what exactly an AI model has captured and what it has not. Muse is able to provide grainy gifs of one fairly simple video game based on seven years of footage, but it is not a solution for holding everything about a game or every possible outcome of what players could do.This is absolutely not a solution for game preservation, Cook concludes, citing areport by gaming archeologist Florence Smith Nicholls about the archiving of digital games. What does it mean to preserve a gameplay experience? Even if this model was a perfect replication of the original executable software, this is not the be-all and end-all of game preservation. A generative model of what game footage maybe looked like once might be a nice curio on the side of a real preservation process, but it is always going to be inferior to other ways we approach the problem.Last month,Take-Two InteractivebossStrauss Zelnick weighed in with his opinion of AI, saying that artificial intelligence is an oxymoron, theres no such thing.Key LinksMicrosoft Research Introducing MuseGoogles Similar GameNGen ProjectThe Eurogamer ArticleMore On Muse by Dr. Michael CookYou can learn more about Microsofts gameplay Ideation AI model in the video below.