If you exist outside MAGA circles, chances are you’re very tired of Elon Musk. In fact, so many people are tired of Elon Musk that X / Twitter’s user base is rapidly shrinking as people flee to the greener pastures of competitors like Bluesky. But alas, Musk—the richest man in the world, newfound regular at Mar-A-Lago, and actual member of Donald Trump’s government—keeps on Musking.
And so, Elon Musk has announced he’s starting an AI video game studio. He’s named it xAI, because he despises good names. To make the announcement as groan-worthy as humanly possible, Musk pledged to do so in order to “make games great again.”
“Too many game studios… are owned by massive corporations,” Musk said during his announcement of xAI. Major companies gobbling up smaller companies and causing massive layoffs is an actual, pressing issue in the video game industry today. While I doubt the human cost is of concern to Musk, I would say even a broken clock is right twice a day. Except that Musk, as the world’s richest man, is emblematic of massive corporations. So.
Musk is something of a gamer. In fact, mere days ago, he apparently became the number one Diablo 4 player in the entire world. That kind of feat theoretically takes hundreds and hundreds of hours of grinding—which seems ridiculous when you’ve been campaigning and presenting with the president elect of a global powerhouse. And while Musk is known to be a Diablo 4 grinder, the current hypothesis is that he used a temporary in-game bug to his advantage on his record-breaking play.
No. Just, no.
Of course, a completely AI-generated video game sounds like an awful thing most people don’t want. AI has long been a factor of video games, driving key factors like enemy movement. But generative AI–which affects the creativity of the game-making process itself—is a very different matter. Unfortunately, most major studios have expressed interest in investigating its uses. The big outlier is Nintendo, who has staunchly said they will not use AI to create its games.
“We have decades of know-how in creating optimal gaming experiences for our customers, and while we remain flexible in responding to technological developments, we hope to continue to deliver value that is unique to us and cannot be achieved through technology alone,” Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, told investors earlier this year.
There’s also the issue of where the AI’s training data will likely come from. Considering that Elon Musk’s X just changed its AI policy so that it’s users cannot opt out of their data being used for training, Musk simultaneously owning an AI video game studio is particularly troubling news. If your account is still up on X, chances are your data will be used to train not only Grok, X’s AI, but also whatever games xAI puts out.
In fact, xAI’s website promises they will “partner closely with X Corp to bring our technology to more than 500 million users of the X app.” (We’ll see what the actual number is by the time they publish a game.)
It additionally seems telling that xAI’s “about” page exclusively lists people and projects revolving around AI. There’s not a single mention of someone with credentials in… you know, gaming. Although getting a bunch of engineer bros to guess their way through a medium without a single actual expert onboard feels very Elon Musk.
So it’s confounding to imagine how xAI could “make games great again.” Especially because, industry woes aside, the actual work being released is incredible right now. Indie games are flourishing. Astro Bot exists. The people behind Persona 5 just released a fantasy game about whether a fair democracy is even possible. Games rule.
So no thanks, Elon. Hard pass.
Published: Nov 28, 2024 06:00 am