No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It
from the nice-try dept
We really need to stop pointing to Artificial Intelligence as some panacea, with all the world’s problems one well-constructed AI prompt away from resolution. That’s especially true when those same problems have much more simple and accessible answers. The preservation of video games has been a hobbyhorse of mine for some time, one which can be very frustrating when simple solutions are there for the taking, but nobody wants to take it. Want to preserve a video game? Release its source code after the main selling window and let the public do it. Boom, it’s preserved.
While that is just now starting to become a trend, it isn’t a road well-traveled by the industry for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons is a combination of adherence to the religion of intellectual property combined with the fear that a dollar might be left on the table somewhere. And that can lead to really silly suggestions, such as Xbox’s Phil Spencer opining that perhaps AI can figure this whole preservation thing out.
Xbox has unveiled its generative AI project Muse, a “generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both.” The publisher is not being specific about this model’s exact uses, but has outlined some potential applications in its announcement. One of those proposed uses is game preservation.
“Today, countless classic games tied to aging hardware are no longer playable by most people,” Xbox says in its announcement post. “Thanks to this breakthrough, we are exploring the potential for Muse to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device. We believe this could radically change how we preserve and experience classic games in the future and make them accessible to more players.”
“One of the things we care a lot about at Xbox is game preservation,” Phil Spencer says in a video accompanying the announcement. “And I think about an opportunity to have models learn about older games, games that were maybe tied to unique pieces of hardware where that engine on that hardware… Time will erode the amount of hardware that’s out there that can actually play a game.”
Alright, let’s stipulate that something is better than nothing. The idea that an AI-created facsimile of a game is better than that game simply disappearing entirely, unfindable in any format, seems immune to a counterpunch. On the other hand, nobody in their right mind would consider this the same as video game preservation. A print of the Mona Lisa is not preserving the Mona Lisa, never mind some AI image generator’s interpretation of the same.
And I’m not the only one pointing this out.
“I actually do think an AI model could observe and replicate game logic,” Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi says on Bluesky, “and that might even be a useful tool for development! But this is like saying a photocopy of a painting is ‘preservation.’ It’s misleading and an insult to the thankless work we archivists do. I’m offended and sickened by this.”
VGHF library director Phil Salvador puts it even more simply: “Generative AI video is a great way to preserve video games, in the sense that mirages are a great source of water.”
Instead, this harkens back to one of the main reasons gaming companies refuse to release their source code to the public. You will notice that, unlike that simple method, Spencer’s plan would allow Microsoft to retain both the full copyrights to any game in question while also providing an easier method for sales on modern hardware. In fact, it would be interesting to hear from Spencer whether he believes these updated versions of games created by AI would get their own separate copyright term. If so, then the preservation claim is simply a lie.
All of this also highlights the simple fact that Spencer is essentially admitting they aren’t doing video game preservation currently because it just takes too much time and energy. If the AI can do it quickly and cheaply, he’s all for it. But if it can’t? Culture can just disappear, apparently.
So, no, sorry, we aren’t going to solve preservation in the gaming industry by throwing AI at it. Unless we simply want to pretend that the word “preservation” means something it currently doesn’t.
Filed Under: ai, muse, phil spencer, preservation, video games, xbox
Companies: microsoft
Comments on “No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It”
The only good thing about AI video game preservation is an untreatable computer preserving a game that also will not generate a copyright in and of itself. But self sacrificing hackers who gain the source code and are willing to go to jail would be the best way to go.
Maybe you’re taking this too seriously Tim, give it a chance, personally I am ecstatic at the chance that I may have to be able to play a video game that has been ‘upgraded’ by an AI, I hope that they teach the AI off of all the games released by triple A studios in the past decade so that that their rewrites come with a seasonal battle-pass and a selection of paid DLC, that is the minimum requirement for games to run on an Xbox nowadays as far as I know.
Re:
Ooh! And microtransactions for cosmetic items and one time fees you can pay for the game not to annoy you and maybe a premium access bundle for better pairing in online matches and a tax to pay for the mandatory anticheat rootkit technology and everything else that is awful about the game industry!
Re:
It’s a mimic, not a re-write.
Oh yeah, forget about IP and copyright, the culpable is the “aging hardware”. It’s exactly why emulators gets banned from online stores, because of “aging hardware”.
But since Microsoft has declared that every on the web is “freeware” for AI, and thinks everybody need a $2k+ AI-computers (i.e. e-waste that will become “aging hardware” in two years), it will soon be announced the classic remake “Pacman the Hedgehog, that throws shurikens on Link the Italian plumber”.
Copyright maximalists: That’s copyright infringement! Sue him! Sue him! Sue him!
Copyright minimalists: Don’t sue him. Destroy copyright so there’s no need to sue him.
Copyright maximalists: Strengthen copyright law even more so we can sue anyone even thinking about getting rid of copyright!
And so the circle turns.
This idea is the Chris Farley method of archiving.
“Remember DOOM? That was cool…”
They’re desperate for a use case for AI that they can sell as indisputaby good to use as a shield for all the evil crap they want to do with it. It’s right out of the crypto ‘banking the unbanked’ playbook, and is likely to be as successful.
Re:
Nvidia cornered the market on an actual viable use case for it with their upscaling and frame gen tech. Everyone else is flailing about trying to find stuff where its error rates don’t make it worse than the existing methods. Unfortunately the main actually promising fields are in surveillance and spyware.
To be entirely fair to Mr Spencer, what I think he’s trying to think up here is that AI would be used to port video games to modern hardware. It’s not an inherently evil proposition, hiring programmers to spend time doing that is expensive, we all get that, but I’ve never seen an AI-generated code project that worked.
Now, I’m sure there’s someone out there running DOOM’s original source code through a LLM and using the results of that to refine the idea but the funny thing about that is they can only do that because they have the source code.
Well now I wonder what Commander Sterling is going to talk about on Monday.
Sure, Phil....
And the infamous Ecce Homo “restoration” was “Preservation”, too.
Working in a source port of a mid-90s game. Reviewing the game definition files (closed source engine) I’ve discovered missing animation frames and undeveloped or removed weapons that are commented out in the def files.
This form of preservation would not recover such information, and is therefore improperly scoped to task. This one of the many deficiencies in the scope of this proposal, which Spencer should have his geek card revoked for even uttering aloud.
Phil Spenser’s Wall of AI.
If only...
If only there was some way to run older games on more modern equipment, some way to, I dunno, ’emulate’ the older systems so that games that were built to run on older hardware and OS’ could be run on modern systems and therefore not need AI to be used to ‘update’ old games for preservation purposes…