The point has come where if a company uses AI, they know exactly what they are doing. Generating images with AI when you know what the public thinks about it is bad. When you do it as a big company with more than enough resources to hire a human, it’s even worse. When you are a big tech company where one of its subsidiaries has created at least one AI and you are fully aware of the ethical and legal problems it entails, it’s time to consider things. And yet, Microsoft has done it without thinking twice.
To celebrate the end of the year and the games we have been playing, the ID@Xbox account decided to ask its followers what their favorite indie game of the year was. A candid and commendable question that has nothing wrong with it. But accompanying it was a corporate image with a more than suspicious style that many users quickly dissected and verified what it really was. It was generated by AI.
How could you know? Children controlling sleds with levers connected to nothing. Children fishing in the snow. A man playing with a laptop whose upper lip is replaced by teeth. Strings going nowhere everywhere. Small details that might make sense if it were a surrealist work, but we don’t believe it was the intention of any commercial illustrator to wish Merry Christmas on behalf of Xbox. Not when we know that those are the kind of things that AI does.
Of course, this has not been well received by the public. The reaction has been extremely negative and can be summarized as, how can they care about indies if they don’t even bother to hire an artist to make their ads?
Of course, Microsoft has already deleted the image of shame. Furthermore, they have done so without responding to the controversy, wanting to let it die in irrelevance. But it is another demonstration of the misuse that can be made and is made of AI. Trying to replace the work of qualified professionals through an automated process without added value. Something that, in the case of Xbox, is particularly problematic as a company that works with technology and artists.
