New Microsoft gaming chief has “no tolerance for bad AI”

But Asha Sharma faces scrutiny for lack of gaming experience.

See full article...

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Because most capitalists are really bad at their jobs, I think they view a stabilized or slightly declining population as a major crisis for capitalism.

Me, I see a world where about 1/2 the global population is either unhoused or underhoused, unfed or underfed, lacking access to clean water and medical care, and underemployed. . . I see that as a huge, huge economic opportunity to both help create jobs for those people, and to provide those necessities to those people. Like trillions of dollars of unrealized economic potential.

Meanwhile the Billionaires are freaking out that they don't have an endlessly growing population where 1/2 of the ever larger population lives in dire poverty.

That about sums it up. The economy is important, but only insofar as it serves the public welfare. It's a VERY optimal system on a small scale for moving goods and services to where they are needed, but at the large scale... well look at the world around us. So, the government needs to step in, to regulate these massive markets, to set up systems in place that can provide for people (including jobs for those we need to facilitate such things), and to redistribute wealth if it gets too stacked in a small handful. I say "the government", but obviously that's gotten corrupt too. Whatever changes need to be made to make the government reflect the will of the people and disregard the will of the rich is what needs to happen for it to work. Flatten hierarchies as much as we're able and it puts the individual voice closer to the top, and help establish a drive and a means for local groups to form naturally, where they can form political pressure on their own and fill the gaps during emergencies. I may have anarchist leanings, but have no illusions that true anarchy is ever attainable or even desirable (in a true and utter anarchy, the strong will emerge to create a hierarchy very fast). It's more of a guideline than anything.

 

[seelive]

My point is "people who are good at a thing aren't always good at leading other people to do that thing." Not that they are mutually exclusive, and specifically not that one HAS to have been good at the thing. So, no, your argument from fallacy is invalid.

You're either strawman'ing or moving the goalpost. No one is faulting her for not being a legendary game dev career. She didn't even have a stint as a marketing director for a month at a game company.

 

[Voldenuit]

Microsoft: No bad AI in our games.
People: What constitutes good AI?
Microsoft: Copilot. Copilot is good AI.

 

[The Sheep Look Up]

Assuming she's not dropping canned answers, Firewatch is a good place to start when discussing what games can do, especially something that isn't [CURRENT ESPORTS LOOTBOX WHALE HUNT]. She's going to lose a few points for the top three - Halo and Goldeneye is quite the mixed message and near perfect setup for a flame war - but she's naming games of significance to gaming. She easily could've rattled off Minecraft, ESO, and I can't stop playing the beta for Horizon 6 OMGZ better preorder! Whatever recurrent MS income streams could best use flogging. Trust me, there's a deeper layer of slimy corpspeak she could've sunk to.

Point being, she has an impossibly large mantle to take on. She's not going to know everything everything. The number of sweaties fit for the job can likely be counted on your fingers. The questions are whether she can learn and adapt, can chart a direction away form the steady slide, and can get buy-in from sometimes-prickly creatives. (If she can light a fire under Todd Howard and/or grind him to a fine paste, she's earned it.)

 

[jdale]

What's wrong with using tools like Claude Code to more efficiently produce games? Game development timelines have been dragging out longer and longer over the last decade or longer.

It would be great if technology helps developers get through the time-consuming rote coding tasks so they can spend more time on what makes their games great and unique.

In other words, there's a huge difference between using low-quality AI artwork versus using AI-assisted workflows to produce games more efficiently.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 got into trouble for using generative AI in their art process, not for using AI coding tools.

Running with Scissors canceled a project because the trailer contained elements “very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.” Again, that's not AI coding tools at issue.

Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) just linked them all together (emphasis added): “AI will ultimately be a powerful tool in the toolbox of every programmer, artist, and designer, just as high level languages, paint programs, and visual scripting were in previous eras.”


I haven't really seen that much pushback against AI development. There's skepticism about the quality of the work, whether it is actually saving developer time, and how it might end up destroying needed expertise, but I can't think of any case where customers rejected a product because AI was used for the coding part. If customers don't reject the product, then the quality of the product will prove or disprove the value of the process.

On the other hand, there have been quite a few examples of customers rejecting products (and marketing) that contained AI-generated art (including video).

I can't tell whether you are misunderstanding the article to think it's just about coding tools, or using that as a dodge to excuse AI, but in practice I think those are very different sets of issues, and at best your comment is missing the point.

 

[EnerJi]

Those statements seem like a clear line in the sand from Sharma against the use of AI tools in Microsoft’s first-party game development, at the very least.

@Kyle Orland I think you have it backwards. I think the exact opposite is going on - I think Microsoft is going to invest in AI-enabled game making tools (both for their first party developers and also for anyone who wants to publish games on Xbox), and is preemptively starting a narrative that Microsoft won't tolerate AI slop, that human auteurs will still be in charge of making games great, etc.

In other words, I think Microsoft's between-the-lines pitch comes down to "we're going to be using a ton of AI to make our games in the future, but don't worry, we'll make sure the games are still good and they will still represent the creative vision of game-making humans."

Time will tell, but I'm awfully confident on this one. Anyone willing to bet against me?

 

[neil95]

There's no such thing as "good AI" though. Except that MS thinks there is, which means first party MS studios are about to get inundated by slop shit.


Capital G Gamers are so pathetic. You could easily just hate this person because they're an empty suit spouting off bullshit AI rhetoric. There's absolutely no reason to be sexist about it, but uhh, life misogyny, finds a way.

There are definitely good uses of AI that aren't generative AI, gen AI is a subset of AI that's possibly the least useful and is the most unethical. As an example a lot of scientists are finding non generative ai tools to analyse mass quantities of data and make new discoveries. Even with generative ai there are reasonable use cases they're just much more niche and limited than the AI companies shoving them into our faces think and even then there are still ethical concerns about sourcing training data and the environment.

As an example, one of the best uses of gen AI is DLSS 4 using its transformer model. It's legitimately significantly improved over the previous non-generative ai versions and as a bonus it's not trained on questionably sourced and arguably stolen art. How is DLSS 4 not an example of good AI in gaming?

I absolutely agree with you about how ridiculous and awful some misogynistic gamers are though. Scepticism of a Microsoft AI chief is fine, sexism is not.

 

[giroro]

Keep in mind the Microsoft Corpo-cult very seriously, deeply, and religiously, believes that all AI is good. To them, "bad AI" simply doesn't exist.
To them, there is good AI (the ones they own) and all 'slop' is made by competing tools - which are still inherently good tools. They are always fundamentally moral, ethical, and beneficial... Those tools just need to be liberated so it can be welded by the 'correct' holy soldiers.

And they hold great contempt for those pitiful, inhuman, expendable "consumers" who dare disagree with their almighty.

They don't care about "artists", because they disagree that anybody but Microsoft can create, or especially own art.

 

[rhavenn]

get your capes out folks, A rich person needs defending!

So, making up bullshit non sequiturs is totally cool cause they're rich?

 

[giroro]

"created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”

Literally translates to "Made exclusively with Microsoft's proprietary AI"

 

[ERIFNOMI]

I'm one rung below you on that give a shit ladder.

Microsoft ceased being part of our family universe completely a couple of months ago when I finished upgrading my roommate's computer to Linux. Once that was done, there are literally no Microsoft products being used or accessed in our home.

I DO get that's not something everyone will do, and it's always a choice. But it IS a choice, and a viable one. We do the SAME GAMING we did before when Windows was the OS of use (if not choice). And no noticeable drop in performance or experience. In fact, my roommate says things load a LOT faster now than before.

So, for all we care, Microsoft can choke on whatever AI slop it decides to shovel to the masses. They have to figure out how to make some kind of profits from their FAFO with OpenAI as each tried to loot the other for their own gains. I feel for those who don't make the switch away from Microsoft, but understand that people will people and they do what they think is right for them.

It's just for those who want to take far more control of their lives (and digital privacy), there are viable options that can replace most of what they have now that don't cost a thing other than time, and, so far, at least, aren't falling into the AI rabbit hole.

Forza runs great on Linux.

 

[DNA_Doc]

<snipped>

1) it's a fact birthrates are declining mostly because the cost of living is sky rocketing and GOPers / Republicans / boomers are doing their very best to pull the ladder up behind themselves after being some of the biggest benefactors of socialistic policies. Raising a family is expensive and getting more and more expensive while wages are more or less stagnant unless you're a C-suite exec and there are only so many of those jobs to go around.

<snipped>

No, that's not a fact at all.

Birthrates (measured as TFR - total fertility rate) have been declining for decades in the US and most other developed countries. US TFR peaked in the 1950s (~3.8) and has generally been below replacement (2.1) since 1971. Provisional 2024 data based on nearly complete records (99.9%) received by the National Center for Health Statistics show the US TFR at 1.6, which is actually a very very slight increase (less than 1%) over 2023.

Similar patterns exist in Europe and East Asia (countries such as South Korea and Japan have TFRs around 0.7-1.3), places you will note are not rife with "GOPers / Republicans / boomers."

There are many reasons for the general trend of declining birthrates, but ultimately, it's tied to modernization. The strongest driver is often thought to be increases in women's agency, education and participation in the labor force. These raise the opportunity costs of children, causing women to delay childbearing (resulting in fewer children) or deciding directly to have fewer children (education is correlated with family size). There's also more widespread access to contraception and family planning (generally speaking), urbanization, longer lives, more intensive parenting expectations, longer work hours/culture, etc.

Cost of living is definitely also a factor, as is broader societal pessimism, but this can't be blamed "mostly" on the groups you call out. The data itself contradict this; US fertility rates are generally higher in Red states than in Blue states. See also here.

 

[Vuurzwam]

And I thought 'slop' was a taboo word at Microslop.

 

[graylshaped]

You're either strawman'ing or moving the goalpost. No one is faulting her for not being a legendary game dev career. She didn't even have a stint as a marketing director for a month at a game company.

I haven't shifted from my original statement that this individual's resumé having stints at Meta and Instacart don't inspire me. I do take issue with those decrying ethnic, gender, or dental-based reasons for their rejection; that is NOT to suggest you are doing so. Rather, you're missing my point.

To that point, I'll ask again: What was it Ballmer gave as his reason for having no choice but to leave Microsoft?

 

[giroro]

Those statements don't read like a clear line against the use of AI tools to me. In fact, they seem deliberately crafted to leave lots of doors at least partially open.

If you're familiar with executive double talk, she's literally doing the exact opposite of drawing a line.
She's saying they're going all-in on generating AI ( but the 'good' kind that she makes, not the offbrand 'slop' from her competition).

And then she's, almost certainly deliberately, trying to muddy the waters by equating her company's (continued) all-in commitment to thoughtless, derivative design as the same 'AI' game logic that controls how NPCs shoot at Master Chief.

But at the end of the day it doesn't matter. The irony is that Xbox will not be able to push out an affordable or appealing customer product, at least not until their company stops consuming all the resources in the world to power their AI.
Microsoft has nothing to sell anymore. They can't produce, because of their own demand. They're eating their own tail.

 

[Ploroxide]

There's no such thing as "good AI" though. Except that MS thinks there is, which means first party MS studios are about to get inundated by slop shit.

In your first sentence, you mean LLM’s don’t you? AI in different forms predates it, and has been used w/o much controversy.

 

[WozNZ]

I see all the arguments, including here, of she has no gaming background. Is that an issue?

If people are really honest both PlayStation and XBOX have been "sub par" with releases this generation. Sony went off on a we must create a live service game that gets Fortnite money and forget our normal IP and MS splooged all its money against the wall buying studios that have resulted in almost nothing and now is panic price rising to try and recover what it spent.

The best thing that could happen, if she is allowed, is to write off the money from the purchases. Reset price expectations for what games sell for and get back to making games that are not just a micro transaction engine with a thin layer of game on top. Make games that are fun so people want to play them. Knowing you are forced to grind because that is more likely to make pay for the item as a microtransaction in the store after you paid full price for the game up front is not fun.

Gaming is not in a bad place at all but AAA gaming is in a bad place with over optimistic budgets and revenue projections that are not able to be realized in the real world.

 

[anon11472]

Is the "good ai" in the room with us now?

 

[Xign]

I’m not defending Microsoft’s choice for the new head of Xbox. Her resume definitely doesn't line up with what you’d think of as an ideal candidate. But to be fair, Phil Spencer had the perfect gaming resume and seems like a decent guy, but Xbox has still completely withered under his leadership.

I'm sure there is a lot of stuff going on in the background that isn't fully under his control, but you generally have to give responsibility to the head of the division. I'm just mostly annoyed that Microsoft keeps buying all these developers and seemingly making things worse. It’s not just Xbox that's suffered but the industry as a whole. They aren’t the only ones doing it but they are probably the biggest.

It's the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. People are arguing that having some passion and knowledge for this space is necessary to run and revive the Xbox division, not a sufficient one.

 

[DNA_Doc]

If you're familiar with executive double talk, she's literally doing the exact opposite of drawing a line.
She's saying they're going all-in on generating AI ( but the 'good' kind that she makes, not the offbrand 'slop' from her competition).

And then she's, almost certainly deliberately, trying to muddy the waters by equating her company's (continued) all-in commitment to thoughtless, derivative design as the same 'AI' game logic that controls how NPCs shoot at Master Chief.

But at the end of the day it doesn't matter. The irony is that Xbox will not be able to push out an affordable or appealing customer product, at least not until their company stops consuming all the resources in the world to power their AI.
Microsoft has nothing to sell anymore. They can't produce, because of their own demand. They're eating their own tail.

Completely agree with your take on her language. (I also live in the world of executive corporate-speaking. Drives me nuts.)

 

[momoisdabest]

Those statements don't read like a clear line against the use of AI tools to me. In fact, they seem deliberately crafted to leave lots of doors at least partially open.

If she wanted to draw a clear line she would say "we will not use any genAI LLMs for anything in our games, period. Especially not any of Microsoft's shit tools."

 

[krimhorn]

Those statements seem like a clear line in the sand from Sharma against the use of AI tools in Microsoft’s first-party game development, at the very least.

It really doesn’t. It just means it’s going to be in places you won’t see it. They’re ABSOLUTELY going to be pushing the use of agentic ai suites and Copilot code gen. That’s where the industry is right now and Microsoft is chasing it harder than most

 

[momoisdabest]

I agree it is over-hyped and 90+% bad the way it is being used. It really is the way the corps are going fast and loose with ethics. I can see various ways it could be used well, but most companies are not using it well.

I could see in gaming that it could be used for alternative inputs in gaming. Like using cameras to detect hands for sign language input or in VR and voice input with very controlled limits, if not rushed and done well. There are potential safe, non-evil uses. Someone could kill someone with a hammer of build something after all. I am not expecting much from the big studios though.

When were talking about "AI" these days it means genAI and GPT LLMs. Thats the evil stuff. Image classifiers and other types of ML/AI etc. are fine, and have been around for decades e.g. the Kinect

 

[momoisdabest]

It really doesn’t. It just means it’s going to be in places you won’t see it. They’re ABSOLUTELY going to be pushing the use of agentic ai suites and Copilot code gen. That’s where the industry is right now and Microsoft is chasing it harder than most

I guess for video games I actually don't really care if they are generating code with LLMs.

(although as a software developer i hate LLMs and personally I never use it because they are ethically and morally bankrupt atm).

But if it's being using for any aspect of the
art (music, gfx, visuals, voice, etc) that's a big no from me.

 

[sarusa]

Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night. -- Seamus Blackley

This is one of the guys who created the original XBox. https://gamesbeat.com/what-an-xbox-founder-thinks-of-the-new-xbox-ceo-seamus-blackley-interview/

 

[SteveBigandTall]

So, making up bullshit non sequiturs is totally cool cause they're rich?

wow dude.

 

[Nilt]

Because most capitalists are really bad at their jobs, I think they view a stabilized or slightly declining population as a major crisis for capitalism.

Me, I see a world where about 1/2 the global population is either unhoused or underhoused, unfed or underfed, lacking access to clean water and medical care, and underemployed. . . I see that as a huge, huge economic opportunity to both help create jobs for those people, and to provide those necessities to those people. Like trillions of dollars of unrealized economic potential.

Meanwhile the Billionaires are freaking out that they don't have an endlessly growing population where 1/2 of the ever larger population lives in dire poverty.

Having that large number of the very poor is a critical part of the billionaire class's existing, though. Without it, there'd be nobody to work for literal pennies a day in US dollars while the end users pay literally thousands of times more for the final product. This is well known among the very wealthy and while a few try to fix it, most refuse to even consider doing so.

 

[jdale]

No, that's not a fact at all.

Birthrates (measured as TFR - total fertility rate) have been declining for decades in the US and most other developed countries. US TFR peaked in the 1950s (~3.8) and has generally been below replacement (2.1) since 1971. Provisional 2024 data based on nearly complete records (99.9%) received by the National Center for Health Statistics show the US TFR at 1.6, which is actually a very very slight increase (less than 1%) over 2023.

Similar patterns exist in Europe and East Asia (countries such as South Korea and Japan have TFRs around 0.7-1.3), places you will note are not rife with "GOPers / Republicans / boomers."

There are many reasons for the general trend of declining birthrates, but ultimately, it's tied to modernization. The strongest driver is often thought to be increases in women's agency, education and participation in the labor force. These raise the opportunity costs of children, causing women to delay childbearing (resulting in fewer children) or deciding directly to have fewer children (education is correlated with family size). There's also more widespread access to contraception and family planning (generally speaking), urbanization, longer lives, more intensive parenting expectations, longer work hours/culture, etc.

Cost of living is definitely also a factor, as is broader societal pessimism, but this can't be blamed "mostly" on the groups you call out. The data itself contradict this; US fertility rates are generally higher in Red states than in Blue states. See also here.

The decline in birthrates is also exaggerated by how it is calculated. A large part of the decline is actually due to women bearing children later in life; delaying rather than decreasing. The average number of children born per woman has not dropped that much. https://theconversation.com/fears-t...llapse-are-based-on-faulty-assumptions-261031

 

[OOPMan]

Is it necessary to have experience in gaming for what is essentially a managerial position?

Well, seeing as how MBAs with no understanding of the industry they're in are noted widely for causing all kinds of problems across a broad range of industries...yes?

 

[khumak50]

Is it necessary to have experience in gaming for what is essentially a managerial position?

If you want them to be any good at it yes, a background in gaming would be a massive bonus so why wouldn't you insist on it?

I'm retired now, but when I was still working in tech I had a long series of managers I worked under. About half of them had technical experience working the same types of jobs they were managing. The other half were non technical with management education and/or experience but zero knowledge relevant to the actual field. Without exception, all of the non technical managers were completely useless. Some of the technical managers were bad as well, but ALL of the managers with no relevant experience were. I don't see why gaming or any other field would be any different. How are you going to make informed decisions about things you literally know nothing about?

Would you hire someone who managed a yoga studio to run a car company? Would you hire someone who has never watched sports to run a professional sports team? Would you hire a Gender Studies major to run a Physics department (or vice versa?) Would you hire someone who used to coach football to run a bank? You could, but you'd be setting yourself up for failure. Not guaranteed, but likely.

Gaming is pretty widespread. If you're hiring a new boss for the gaming division why wouldn't you hire someone with equivalent or better management experience in addition to an actual interest in gaming? A non gamer is going to make bad decisions when it comes to things that are actually important to gamers.

Admittedly a lot of companies make the opposite mistake as well and promote people who are good individual contributors but who have no management training and no real aptitude or desire to actually do a management job aside from the presumably higher salary. You really want someone with both.

 

[Quiet Entropy]

Y...yeah? As opposed to what, exactly?

The role of an executive as the head of a major department in a large company is to be a talking head advocating for their teams, navigating the political and corporate environment of a present company while attempting to secure as many resources - time, money, positions, whatever - as possible for their department.

You don't want an 'in the weeds' engineer to be an executive any more than you want an executing to roll up their sleeves and write code.

Psssst...........Boeing...psst. What they did was in the merger, go with the McDonnell/Douglas managers (Not Engineers) and the rest is continuing history.

 

[niftykev]

If we're talking about LLMs in games... I could possibly tolerate a character driven LLM that could give the inconsequential NPCs lots of useless dialog that fit the narrative of that NPC instead of the 0 to 5 lines they may get.

They would make great inn/tavern keepers in D&D style games. They can confabulate all they want, as those types were always notorious for having mostly false rumors!

But quest givers? That stuff better be human generated and static!

 

[Ploroxide]

This is one of the guys who created the original XBox. https://gamesbeat.com/what-an-xbox-founder-thinks-of-the-new-xbox-ceo-seamus-blackley-interview/

A journalist counters that:

The other concern is that she’s been appointed by Nadella as some kind of executioner of the Xbox console. Her memo doesn’t suggest that, and Microsoft could have easily appointed Matt Booty into that kind of role to push game publishing instead of the Xbox console. I get the impression from sources that Microsoft wants a turnaround and is worried about losing Xbox, as it’s one of its only remaining successful consumer brands.

Those who know Sharma better describe her as enthusiastic, willing to learn, and very capable of getting teams to execute on a clear vision rather than coming in as a product executioner.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/883015/microsoft-xbox-new-ceo-shakeup-notepad

 

[Woolfe]

<snip>

But MS isn't going to stop AI, they're going to profit.

How? How are they going to profit? From everything I am reading they are all finding it very difficult to actually break even let alone profit from the AI investment.

 

[khumak50]

If we're talking about LLMs in games... I could possibly tolerate a character driven LLM that could give the inconsequential NPCs lots of useless dialog that fit the narrative of that NPC instead of the 0 to 5 lines they may get.

They would make great inn/tavern keepers in D&D style games. They can confabulate all they want, as those types were always notorious for having mostly false rumors!

But quest givers? That stuff better be human generated and static!

Personally, I think adding some AI based chatbot dialog to games could make the characters a lot more interesting than the ones we see now with a very small number of hard coded responses that they just repeat ad nauseum. Nvidia already has demos of a few different game like scenarios like that where you can actually ask NPCs whatever you want instead of picking from a list and they will answer intelligently and persuasively based on the knowledge that character should actually possess while also allowing for things like restrictions on what the character is allowed to say, telling them to lie about certain topics, leaving loopholes that allow the player to trick the NPC into giving up info, etc. For people who haven't seen those demos you can literally type out whatever you want to ask the NPCs just like you would ask a question of ChatGPT or some other chatbot.

I think the only reason we haven't really seen any games make use of that kind of thing yet (that I have seen at least), is that game devs have to cater to the lowest common denominator when it comes to hardware. So they have to make a game that works for people who do NOT have a GPU that is well suited to AI. So that AI driven dialog system is probably not going to work for someone still playing on their trusty old GTX 1050. Or their 10 year old laptop with integrated graphics and no discrete GPU at all.

I'm actually more excited in general about the possibilities for quests/dialog/etc that are AI driven eventually than I am for DLSS 5.0 or whatever adding more fake frames. I just don't think it's really going to happen until the worst gaming hardware that shows up on that steam hardware survey is something along the lines of an RTX 4060 or an AMD card of equivalent AI performance.

To use Cyberpunk as an example you might be able to entirely replace all the work the developers did on dialog for all of the minor characters by just adding some pretty basic tags to let the AI know how those characters should act and what they should know. Character A is a member of the MOX, female, rude, and dumb. Character B is in the Maelstrom faction, male, insane, and easily provoked. So character A knows detailed info about the MOX, who she's a member of but is limited by not being very smart and will probably tell the player to F off if not properly motivated. Character B knows a lot about the Maelstrom faction he's a part of but since he's insane he might be tough to understand and will probably spout a lot of gibberish ending in an actual fight when the player says the wrong thing and provokes him too much. So the dev didn't have to write any dialog at all for those characters, just add a few tags and the AI takes care of the rest. They're minor so it doesn't really matter if their responses are consistent from game to game, in fact variation probably makes a subsequent play through more interesting because it's different.

For major characters I would think the devs would want to add more of a personal touch to quests and dialog but AI could handle small talk and minor stuff for them or just things that the player might want to talk to them about that the devs didn't hard code any responses for.

 

[Epke]

Interesting i have no Tolerance for AI period!

 

[Woolfe]

I'm always torn on the whole "Toxic gamer" as a cultural group thing. I mean don't get me wrong I have definitely come across them, but whether its just my personal experience or because Aussie has a better mob of gamers, I just find the vast majority of "gamers" are not terrible people.

My gaming group consists of 50 year olds, late 20s/early 30 year olds and a bunch of early 20 somethings and late teens. Of about 30 different people we had 1 guy who was what I would call toxic, which all came out in a game of Chivalry 2 when a simple comment about some internet other person being good at the game turned into a rant about the Israel-Palestine situation(he was on the genocidal side). He has since been booted from the group as this was pretty indicative of his behaviour in general. Overall everyone is pretty good. Yes there is "off" humour at times but overall everyone is tolerant and reasonable.

That doesn't mean we don't see it. We mostly prefer playing amongst our group because "hell is other people" but that really only applies to those with the shield of internet anonymity. Those we play regularly with who become known, even if only virtually, just don't fit the tropes.

I don't know, I am not saying it doesn't exist, because I can clearly see it does. But I just am not experiencing it in my group/s

 

[LACave]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 got into trouble for using generative AI in their art process, not for using AI coding tools.

Running with Scissors canceled a project because the trailer contained elements “very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.” Again, that's not AI coding tools at issue.

Tim Sweeney (Epic Games) just linked them all together (emphasis added): “AI will ultimately be a powerful tool in the toolbox of every programmer, artist, and designer, just as high level languages, paint programs, and visual scripting were in previous eras.”


I haven't really seen that much pushback against AI development. There's skepticism about the quality of the work, whether it is actually saving developer time, and how it might end up destroying needed expertise, but I can't think of any case where customers rejected a product because AI was used for the coding part. If customers don't reject the product, then the quality of the product will prove or disprove the value of the process.

On the other hand, there have been quite a few examples of customers rejecting products (and marketing) that contained AI-generated art (including video).

I can't tell whether you are misunderstanding the article to think it's just about coding tools, or using that as a dodge to excuse AI, but in practice I think those are very different sets of issues, and at best your comment is missing the point.

I agree with you. But read through the comments on this article and you'll see numerous heavily upvoted comments claiming that there's no such thing as a helpful or good LLM or generative AI model in general, which is what my comment is addressing. I suspect that if you polled the Ars readership they'd be heavily against any use of AI in game development, including using AI-assisted coding tools. It's obvious how emotionally invested they are in AI failing.

My read on the article is that the new Xbox chief is suggesting that their integration of AI is going to be thoughtful and subtle so as to avoid those reputational issues that you highlight. I agree that if the end product is just as good as if the AI tools hadn't been used then there's no reason to complain (but you know the readership of Ars absolutely would).

 

[jdale]

I agree with you. But read through the comments on this article and you'll see numerous heavily upvoted comments claiming that there's no such thing as a helpful or good LLM or generative AI model in general, which is what my comment is addressing. I suspect that if you polled the Ars readership they'd be heavily against any use of AI in game development, including using AI-assisted coding tools. It's obvious how emotionally invested they are in AI failing.

My read on the article is that the new Xbox chief is suggesting that their integration of AI is going to be thoughtful and subtle so as to avoid those reputational issues that you highlight. I agree that if the end product is just as good as if the AI tools hadn't been used then there's no reason to complain (but you know the readership of Ars absolutely would).

I don't think I share your assessment of the commenters. It's hard to say for sure, but is there even a single comment that is clearly specific to coding tools here?

Commenters (myself included I guess) could be more specific about what they are criticizing, but when the executive in question herself conflates NPC actions with AI, I think everyone else gets a pass.

 

[sarusa]

A journalist counters that:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/883015/microsoft-xbox-new-ceo-shakeup-notepad

The big problem is that she's claiming two things which are 100% counter to everything else Microslop is doing when taken together:

• She claims they're not going to fill games with AI slop
• She claims they're going to revitalize Xbox hardware

I could believe they would try for either of those on their own, fine, but not both of those together. AI is being rammed sideways up the ass of every product at Nadella's demand, and if you're not doing that you're not getting budget and your project is being backwatered if not outright shut down.

Why would anyone think that the XBox division, which they've already let languish horribly, would be the one exception to that? If they're not slowly sunsetting it then I think the first item is the one that will be cast aside. They will fill their games and a new console with AI shit and go 'Oh this is AI but it's not shit, it's awesome, like Copilot and Clippy and Teams!' and Slopya will get up on stage and tell us AI Revenue is way up because every Xbox game sale counts as 'AI Revenue', like every Office sale.