Elon Musk, a billionaire loser who ruined my favourite social media platform, allegedly makes weird posts about himself under an alt where he pretends to be his son, and the owner of multiple massive corporations just made a tweet announcing that since too many game studios are owned by massive corporations, he’s going to start an AI game studio under his own corporation, xAI. Is logic in the room with us? Seemingly not, but that’s to be expected with Musk.
The layman (a normal person unfamiliar with Elon Musk’s quirks, as much as that is possible when he’s constantly dominating news cycles with his stupid antics), might find this alarming, especially if they think generative AI is a bad thing. Elon Musk is a known gamer, who seems to spend so much time gaming that I wonder if he does any real work at his actual jobs.
Probably not, he’s a CEO.
He has, in the past, followed through with outlandish claims that nobody thought he was serious about, most famously, buying Twitter and then driving it into the ground – though he did try to back out at the last moment. A generative AI-led studio would be a huge setback for many game developers and actors who are pushing back against the technology in video games.
Many in the game industry don’t want to use generative AI, because it can’t produce the results that handcrafting and attention to detail can. They certainly don’t want it normalised, especially as companies like Unity and Ubisoft are already implementing it in their own workflows. But I’m not worried about it, and here’s why.
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Elon Musk Loves To Lie
Elon Musk sometimes goes through with the stuff he says he’s going to do, but he also often doesn’t.
For example, he said he was going to cage fight Mark Zuckerberg, who actually trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and MMA, and then chickened out, which in all fairness was the wise thing to do.
I have lots of friends who do BJJ – even at the white belt level, they could take me out of commission in seconds. They could rupture my tendons before I knew what was happening.
His Hyperloop concept, which is essentially a corporatised reimagining of the high-speed rail, never materialised apart from a few short tunnels near SpaceX headquarters. He tweeted that he would take Tesla private, and was sued for fraud by investors when the deal didn’t go ahead, then forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to step down as Tesla’s chairman for three years. He’s peddled conspiracy theories about American politicians, vaccines, and the 2020 US presidential election. He’s the king of baseless yapping. Don’t take much of what he says seriously.
Games Aren’t Exactly Easy To Make
Even on the off chance that he’s not just talking out of his [redacted] and he does actually set up an AI game studio, it’s doubtful anything will come of it. With his track record, he’ll probably drive the whole operation into the ground. He doesn’t know anything about making games, and no self-respecting developer will drop whatever they’re doing to help him.
Let’s say he does manage to set up a studio. Realistically, a wholly generative-AI run studio will simply not make a good game. As we all know, generative AI is incapable of creativity or critical thought. It can’t solve problems it’s never encountered before. It can’t come up with innovative ideas to set it apart from everything else in the gaming space. EA, a massively rich corporation with decades of experience in the industry, has already tried to create an AI tool that will create a video game for you in real time, and it sucks. Why would Musk be able to do it?
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We’re in a time where we’re seeing studios with perfectly good ideas and impressive pedigrees getting shut down despite their potential. This week alone saw not one, but two studios led by Mass Effect veterans shutting down or pausing operations because of a lack of funding. Neither of those studios had even launched the games they were working on. I assume Musk’s studio won’t have an issue with funding, but the project is unlikely to have any financial viability. The generative AI is a novelty, but that’s far from enough to give any game it makes the juice to go the distance.
Okay, let’s say it does get made. In a couple of years, xAI launches a game. People are probably going to think it’s bad, because it will be. It won’t do anything new or interesting, because AI just isn’t capable of that in its current form. Sure, some people might buy it because they love Elon Musk in a way that’s totally normal and not weird at all, but the vast majority of regular people are going to side-eye them and ignore it, because it will be a novelty game and not much else.
Seriously, Don’t Worry About It
I’m not going to say I hope he actually goes through with it – it’s a stupid idea that will, realistically, do more harm to the industry than good – but if he does, it’ll just be proof that the whole concept is a non-starter. We saw this with the rise and fall of NFT games, which despite capitalising on hot new tech, have largely been looked at with derision because they’re moronic. The same will happen here.
If I’m eating my words in a couple of years, so be it. But I seriously doubt that we need to react to this ‘announcement’ with anything but an eye roll.
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