Xbox allegedly used AI art for indie games promotion

An Xbox brand account has been accused of using AI-generated art to promote indie games.

ID@Xbox, Xbox’s indie games label, posted to X (formerly Twitter) an image of a winter-themed scene showing the Xbox logo and several people playing in the snow.

However, shortly after the image was posted, users quickly pointed out that the image appeared to be AI-generated, citing the strange black lines running throughout the image, most of which appear to have no purpose.

It was also pointed out that the Xbox logo isn’t a correct replication of the brand’s standard text logo. The faces of the characters featured in the art also appear to be generated due to their strange appearance and proportions.

The deletion has yet to be acknowledged by the account. However, the move was been widely condemned on social media by artists and fans of Xbox. “Nothing says you care about independent work more than using AI for your promotional art,” replied artist Joey Miller on X. 

The use of AI has been controversial in the video game industry, with many players and developers publicly rejecting the technology due to concerns over plagiarism and the threat to artists’ jobs. However, this hasn’t stopped publishers from pursuing the technology in other areas of game development.

In November, Xbox announced a multi-year deal with Inworld to build AI dialogue and narrative tools at scale, which it said would enable it to deliver “an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design.”

Xbox’s chief financial officer, Tim Stuart later elaborated at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit: “On the developer side, you think about the millions and millions of dollars in a game spent on localisation, script, how you think about players moving from point A to point B and you have non-player characters have dialogue.

“AI can take care of all that. You now say, ‘I need the player to get from A to B’ and instead of having to write thousands of lines of scripting or code, you just have the AI get you from A to B. Things like localisation and putting things in new languages.

“When we think about game testing, a million AI bots can run through a level of Minecraft and find where players get stuck, where they spend money, how they think about the level. So, this is—pun intended—game-changing for the developer.”