Microsoft’s divisive new gaming AI uses years of players’ gameplay data

You may have helped train the Muse generative AI, which is pitched as a way to help developers iterate faster and maybe even recreate retro games.

Examples of the Muse AI’s creation of new scenes that resemble gameplay footage of Bleeding Edge. The AI was trained on existing footage of the game and players’ inputs that produced the gameplay in that footage. Images: Microsoft

Microsoft announced a generative AI video game breakthrough yesterday and the two key reactions to be aware of are the following:

1. Wired quoted game developers, many of whom fear AI is coming for their jobs (and believe AI can’t do their jobs better than they can) saying variations of “nobody will want this.”

2. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, bullish on the AI-fueled growth of his company, tweeted about it, saying: “If you thought AI-generated text, images, and video were cool, just imagine entire interactive environments like games!”

The AI breakthrough in question was confusing, and its implications for gaming hard to parse.

But beyond what it is, there’s something else I haven’t seen people discuss that’s pretty important: where it comes from…. whose data it learned from. That’d possibly be your data. You maybe trained it by playing an Xbox game a few years ago.