You might have heard about the recent shakeup at Xbox. Phil Spencer, the longest-serving leader in Xbox history, has stepped down and handed the reins over to Asha Sharma, the new Commander-in-Chief.
Stories, rumors, and gamertags have been flying around the internet, but importantly, so has the conversation surrounding Xbox and its future use of AI. You see, Asha Sharma isn’t just a random person, but the former head of CoreAI at Microsoft since 2024.
Microsoft and Xbox — AI is not a replacement
I was pretty adamant the other day when the announcement was made that Asha Sharma would be taking over. Heck, I was rather terrified at the prospect of AI taking over a beloved industry whose entire backbone lives through the hearts of creatives.
I thought to myself that a company like Microsoft wouldn’t simply skip over its leaders in the gaming space for someone leading an AI team unless it meant something. At least, I did. That was until her and CCO Matt Booty’s recent interview with our own Jez Corden.
During their time, she recommitted to the idea that there would never be any AI slop within an Xbox game.
“I think that with any new technology, it brings possibilities as a tool, but even more important, especially now, we need to draw lines on what we won’t do,” she illustrated. “That’s what I attempted to do when I shared my opening letter. I will not flood our ecosystem with slop.”
Continuing, “We won’t have careless output, we won’t have derivative work. I deeply believe in the words that I shared previously there. I think in games, there have been a number of transitions in technologies. This is not new. There was 2D to 3D, hand animation to motion capture, and everything you can imagine.”
Developers are free from any AI directives
Matt Booty chimed in as well, noting that Microsoft is not pushing any sort of AI on developers or Xbox, and that teams are free to use technology to improve their development efforts.
“We’ve got no pressure from Microsoft; there are no directives on AI coming down. Our teams are free to use any technologies that might be beneficial, whether it’s helping write code or check for bugs, or things more in the production pipeline. At the end of the day, as Asha said, we’re committed to art made by people.”
Further, he showcased the fact that AI, like tools that came before it, will shine as a tool and not a replacement for human creation.
“Just as a group, game developers are always eager to adopt new technology. When Photoshop showed up, it took about one month for it to appear in every game studio on the planet because it was so useful. Game teams are never hesitant to adopt new technology, but what I hear throughout our studios: it is the people, our artists, our coders, the writers, they’re doing the creative work. Technology is in support of that. In my experience, any time there’s a new technology, what happens is there’s a need for more specialists, new specialists, and it raises the bar on what the expectations are for the quality of the games.”
Hearing these words brings me a higher form of optimism than I previously had. I was very vocal against the potential use of AI and the possibility that the touch of humanity could disappear. Hearing both Asha and Matt Booty come out and talk in terms of ethical use is where I’ve always believed the discussion to be most critical.
I talked about this once with ARC Raiders, how I saw their form as a decent, or “just” use of AI in game creation. So long as the intent, seed, and actual human creatives aren’t replaced, using AI to bolster already amazing work is the exact use case I can see for AI.
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