Microsoft has announced a partnership with generative AI company Inworld to “build AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale” and the initial response on social media has not been positive.
Microsoft is no stranger to rolling out AI tools across its suite of products and services. The company directly partnered with OpenAI for Bing Chat, and now Copilot is rolling out to all Windows 11 users. Now, it appears that Xbox is next up for the company’s AI integrations.
In a post detailed on Microsoft’s “Game Dev” blog, the company announced that it would be partnering with a generative AI firm named Inworld to “Build AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale”. Considering the number of studios under Microsoft’s belt, this new piece of technology could radically change many of their ways of working.
It’s similar to an Nvidia demo, which showcased similar AI-generated dialogue months ago.
The blog continues to state that the toolset will include the following: “An AI design copilot that assists and empowers game designers to explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.”
In addition to “An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.”
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Microsoft’s General Manager for AI at Xbox, Hayan Zhang claims that the AI tools will try to make it easier for developers to “push the boundaries of gaming today”. But, the response to the announcement online by players and developers has been far from positive.
Players & developers speak out against Xbox generative AI
The response to Microsoft’s announcement that it will be developing AI-assisted generative AI tools for dialogue hasn’t gone down well on social media. Both developers and players alike have expressed their disappointment about the impending tools. One X / Twitter user stated: “This is a bad idea for so many reasons, but the biggest is that it WILL lead to more layoffs.”
Please just stop. So now you'll be laying off a bunch of writers in several years? I don't want AI generated stories! Human experience informs our best stories.
— TheSeventhVoid (@welter_117) November 6, 2023
Developers have also chimed in with the recent development. Nat Clayton, Level designer at Bithell Games exclaimed: “very cool and very fun to read at the end of a year in which the games industry laid off like 6,000 people”.
Callum Langstroth, Senior Designer at PlayStation’s London Studio exclaimed the following in response to the article on social media: “Hey isn’t this the exact kind of stuff that caused the US TV and film writers and actors to go on strike? Just saying…”.
While it’s still early days for Xbox’s foray into bringing generative AI tools to developers, it seems like they might face a lot of resistance not only from developers but also fans.