Microsoft Execs Compare Muse AI Tool to CGI’s Influence on Films, Highlighting Its Potential to Preserve Games

Microsoft is fervently pushing for global adoption of its newly unveiled Muse AI tool, a World and Human Action Model (WHAM) in development. The company describes it as a “generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation” that can create game visuals, controller actions, or both. Microsoft executives believe it could revolutionize the industry, likening its potential impact to that of CGI in movies.

These bold claims come from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and CEO Satya Nadella, who are eager to highlight Muse’s capabilities. Spencer shared his vision:

“You could imagine a world where […] gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games [from] and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run. We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”

Nadella, in an interview, expressed his enthusiasm for Muse, calling its current iteration “a massive, massive moment of wow” when he witnessed it in action.

“It’s like the first time we saw ChatGPT complete sentences,” he said. “What I’m excited about is bringing a catalog of games soon that we are going to train these models to generate and then start playing them. It’s kinda like the CGI moment even for gaming long term.”

However, not everyone in the industry or computer science community shares Microsoft’s optimism. AI researcher and game designer Dr. Michael Cook analyzed Muse, noting that Microsoft’s dataset doesn’t generate gameplay or ideas but instead evaluates visual data from videos to predict player actions.

“It’s impressive that it can do this using visual information because things like lighting, camera angles, user interface, and so on are a lot for an AI model to handle,” Cook writes. “But ultimately, even with all of this data, all the time spent annotating datasets, and so on, it was still only just about able to generate footage.”

Regarding game preservation, Aftermath argues that relying on an AI-generated reconstruction to fill in gaps of an old game without access to its original engine is not the same as true preservation.

“A dusty Sega Mega Drive sitting in storage alongside a copy of Sonic 2 and Jungle Strike is video game preservation. A dodgy arcade cabinet with 1000 classic arcade games on it, all of them running their original code via emulation, is video game preservation,” Aftermath states. “If you’re reading this and are interested in supporting actual video game preservation, please donate to the Video Game History Foundation.”

Additionally, there’s the issue of developer sentiment. As surveys suggest, many developers harbor significant disdain for AI-generated tools. Despite this, Microsoft remains undeterred in its pursuit of this technological frontier.