Last week’s surprise departure of Phil Spencer from Microsoft led to the promotion of Asha Sharma, who comes to head Microsoft’s gaming division after two years as president of the company’s CoreAI Product group. Despite that recent history, Sharma says in a new interview that she has “no tolerance for bad AI” in game development.
Speaking with Variety, Sharma noted that “AI has long been part of gaming and will continue to be,” before adding that “great stories are created by humans.” The interview comes after Sharma promised in an introductory memo that “we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop. Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”
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. But what separates “bad AI” and “soulless AI slop” from “innovative technology” that humans can use to create artful games is a matter of some significant debate in the gaming world.
Many have taken a zero-tolerance approach to the use of generative AI tools in video games. When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 studio Sandfall Interactive admitted to using generative AI for some background assets, for instance, the Indie Game Awards rescinded the company’s honors (the assets were later patched out of the game). And publisher Running with Scissors cancelled a planned new game in the Postal series after being “overwhelmed with negative responses” to a trailer containing elements they said were “very likely AI-generated and thus has caused extreme damage to our brand and our company reputation.”
At the same time, game development luminaries like John Carmack have defended AI development tools as “allow[ing] the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.” And Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney says requiring developers to disclose their use of AI tools is as relevant as disclosing “what shampoo brand the developer use,” since “AI will be involved in nearly all future production [of games].”