Xbox's new Muse generative AI may be compatible with user-created mods

Microsoft's new generative AI tech could be compatible with user-generated content and pave the way to a new kind of customized gaming experience.

A bit ago, Microsoft made waves by announcing Muse, a generative AI gaming world model that essentially creates procedural gameplay from user inputs. Microsoft also said that it will start using its first-party games to train Muse, but devs can opt out if they choose.

There's still a lot of unknowns about Muse's practical applications, at least in the sense how a gamer could utilize it. In a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggests that content created with Muse could mesh well with user-created mods, and as someone who grew up playing Bethesda games on PC, this immediately piqued my interest.

"We're going to call it Muse. It's going to be the model of this world action, or human action model.

"This is very cool. One of the things is that obviously, Dall-E and Sora have been unbelievable in what they've been able to do in terms of generative models.

"One thing that we wanted to go after was using gameplay data. Can you actually generate games that are both consistent and then have the ability to generate the diversity of what that game represents, and then are persistent to user mods?"

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Immediately after this quote, Nadella goes on to say that Microsoft will continue experimenting and utilizing Muse for various game projects. To collect the data for Muse, Microsoft recorded seven years' worth of gameplay matches in an unsuspecting live service game called Bleeding Edge.

"The cool thing is what I'm excited about is bringing--we're going to have a catalog of games soon that we will start using these models, or we're going to train these models to generate, and then start playing them," Nadella finished.

The Muse AI video has stayed unlisted on the Xbox channel and has a negatively-skewed like-dislike ratio.