Some gamers have accused Xbox of using “artwork” generated by AI programs to promote indie games on social media…

When services like Midjourney, Dall-E, and ChatGPT became hugely successful, AI-generated content became a controversial topic. This is especially true for AI-generated art. Small segments of AI-generated text are hard to spot. But the imperfections of AI “art” are easy to spot. Many players and artists criticize AI companies for using artists’ work to train their models without their consent. So, the conversation gets pretty heated when a company is caught using such content. Especially when it comes to a fish as big as the Xbox.

On December 27th, the Xbox ID@Xbox account took to Twitter to ask fans what their favourite indie games of 2023 were.

The tweet used an artwork depicting children sledging in the snow along with the caption “ID XBOX”. Although the artwork looks normal at first glance, it’s easy to spot creepy details like children with moustaches, oddly shaped objects, or even a man with his lips fused to his teeth. This angered some of the community, as several players believed that these were signs that Microsoft was using artificial intelligence. After the controversy grew, Xbox deleted the original tweet.

While gamers are generally opposed to the use of artificial intelligence in games and advertising, some developers seem to have a more positive view of this new technology. Kazuhisa Wada, the director of the Persona series, for example, shared a positive opinion about artificial intelligence earlier this year. According to him, AI art can be helpful in sketching while coming up with different concepts for the same idea.

However, he did not think that AI art could replace artists or that it should be used in the final product.

Microsoft announced new AI partnerships last month. It looks like it’s ready to use more of this technology in game development as well. By offering developers products such as Azure AI and Copilot for Microsoft 365, Microsoft wants to put new tools in the hands of developers. However, whether all this will work as planned remains to be seen.

Source: Kotaku

Nothing says "we don't care about indie developers" like using AI.

If you can't hire an artist to do advertising, I highly doubt you'll do it with independent developers https://t.co/wgFgIlIYUG

— NecroKuma (COMM OPEN 2024!) (@NecroKuma3) December 27, 2023