In a recent interview with IGN, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has confirmed that even though Xbox is already using AI, it’s not in the way many players may be thinking right now and that there’s not really a mandate from the top down of the company when it comes to using AI for making videogames.
“Our applications of AI today are mostly actually on the security and protection of our networks,” he stated, which is related to the voice and text chat on the Xbox platform.
“It’s now at a scale where you can’t really moderate the safety of those with just people alone. The volume is too high. So we have AI that we use to make sure that the conversation and topics that are happening, and for protected child accounts and other things and who gets to talk to those accounts to those people, is locked down by parents or guardians who are setting those controls. That’s our primary use of AI inside of our organization today, which maybe isn’t the most glamorous use of AI, but it’s something that I fundamentally believe in.”
Spencer also said that AI won’t be used in the creative space for videogames, at least when it comes to the Xbox platform:
“On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,” he said. “I have found that creative teams will use tools that make their job easier when it makes their job easier, and any top-down mandate that ‘Thou must use a certain tool’…is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate.”
Which effectively means that even though AI will definitely be used at certain stages in videogames, the primary human element of creativity and expression will remain untouched, at least on the Xbox platform.
