Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer appeared on a moderated panel with Double Fine Studio Head Tim Schafer at the Paley International Council Summit in Palo Alto, California today, discussing “Big Ideas, Small Games: Creativity Beyond the Blockbuster.” In the panel, moderated by Idilio CEO Gabriela Tafur, Spencer was asked about AI use at Xbox. He said that Xbox does use AI, but probably not how you might think.
“Our applications of AI today are mostly actually on the security and protection of our networks,” he said, referring to voice and text chat on Xbox Live. “It’s now at a scale where you can’t really moderate the safety of those with just people alone. The volume is too high. So we have AI that we use to make sure that the conversation and topics that are happening, and for protected child accounts and other things and who gets to talk to those accounts to those people, is locked down by parents or guardians who are setting those controls. That’s our primary use of AI inside of our organization today, which maybe isn’t the most glamorous use of AI, but it’s something that I fundamentally believe in.”
He did, however, address the big question of AI use in the creative process of making games: “On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,” he said. “I have found that creative teams will use tools that make their job easier when it makes their job easier, and any top-down mandate that ‘Thou must use a certain tool’…is not really a path to success. I look at the teams, and we make tools available, and I kind of let it organically percolate.”
“On the creative side, I really leave it up to the teams,” Spencer said.
He stayed on the AI topic, but pivoted to the idea of how it might be used for game discovery. “An area that you’ve talked about that’s interesting is discovery,” he told Tafur. “How do I find the next thing that I might love? In that scenario where we are looking at some of the AI tools – it’s not in practice today – but is there a way for us to use discovery based on things that you’ve done in the past to surface the next thing that you might not know about that might be interesting to you?
“On the production side, which I think is where a lot of people go…we don’t have any goals in our model for that to happen. I think more about the pace of creativity, maybe the number of things we can try and take risks on before we decide on our next opportunity. But our AI use today is much more operational than it is in the creative space.”
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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.