Xbox's Copilot for Games & The Real Aloy Reacts | AI and Games Newsletter 19/03/25
A quick update from the chaos of GDC
Our monthly sponsor issue of the newsletter provides what you come to expect every week from AI and Games: with a summary of the big talking points in AI in the games industry, plus announcements of relevant events, books, courses, and more. However the main segment of this issue gives our paying supporters a deep-dive into what’s coming up across the board. From future newsletter topics, to YouTube episodes, new projects, our conference planning and much more.
You can read part of each sponsor issue for free, and then catch the rest with a paid subscription to AI and Games.
Greetings all,
reporting in live from GDC 2025! It is, unsurprisingly, outright chaos right now as I’m trying to maintain my composure and not appear like I’m sweating buckets as I head from meeting to meeting in and around the Moscone Center. It’s also been a busy couple of days in the space in and around AI for games, and there’s been some news stories and other items of interest while I’ve been here.So I’ll quickly bring you up to speed on these, and then this week it’s the sponsor update (behind the paywall), in which I bring you up to speed on what’s going on for future content, be it Substack, YouTube, the AI and Games Conference and Goal State!
Follow AI and Games on: BlueSky | YouTube | LinkedIn | TikTok
Announcements
Let’s do a quick round-up of some announcements, starting of course with new conference talks!
New Videos from the AI and Games Conference 2024
We still have a couple of talks left to publish from last years conference. This week we’re talking building Minecraft settlements with AI, and LLM-driven story generation from the experts!
The AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
How would you build an AI system to build a settlement in Minecraft? What are the challenges you’ll face? What techniques would work best? Since it’s founding seven years ago, the Generative Design in Minecraft Competition (GDMC) has been explored these the challenge of adaptive and holistic content generation algorithms. Lead organiser Dr Christoph Salge discusses the works of the competition participants in recent years, the trends that are emerging, and what you can expect in this years edition.
Escaping the Infinite Mid: Featuring Laughs, Language Models, & Violence!
While much has been said of the potential of large language models in creating novel experiences, they are something of a liability when operating in established worlds. Critically, LLMs are indifferent to the boundaries of intellectual property. Hidden Door’s Chris Wallace details how the company has been utilising them in constrained ways with procedural generation, templating, and “classical” natural language techniques to allow stories that feel meaningfully different every time, but respect the world in which they occur.
AI (and Games) in the News
A bunch of headlines that caught my eye this past week! I suspect there will be something announced in the last 48 hours at GDC I have missed, but if so I’ll catch it next week!
Xbox Announces ‘Copliot For Gaming’
A story that sort of came and went was the announcement by Xbox of ‘Copilot for Gaming’. This was actually a topic we raised last year after the initial announcement of the project was a video edited to be evocative of the intended product, rather than how it actually worked. The idea is similar to that of ‘Copilot’ across all of Microsoft’s 365 (nee Office) products, where it uses generative AI to support you in work, but now it will act as an interactive help system when playing games. Allowing you to ask for tips on how to achieve specific tasks, or overcome specific challenges while you play.
Since then we’ve had a larger announcement of this from Xbox, both on the Xbox Wire blog and the official Xbox podcast which I link to below. The segment starting around 04:40 gets into the Copilot system will be doing, but again we don’t see anything concrete. It’s noted in the video that these are product concepts only.
At this time the Copilot tool is not live, but it’s implied this will come to the Xbox Insider Program which players can sign up for. I’m aware that there is a presentation by Xbox that happened yesterday at GDC on this but my time was focussed on supporting our speakers at the AI Summit. I’ll hopefully get a chance to follow-up on this another time. But my initial thought is purely a branding one: gamers don’t care about the Copilot brand, and I think it was a missed opportunity to bring back Cortana as an voice-based interaction system once again.
Will The Real Aloy Please Stand Up
As discussed in last weeks issue, an AI chatbot by Sony designed to evoke the character of Aloy from the Horizon games by Guerrilla leaded onto the internet. The response was not positive, in part due to it being an AI-driven reproduction of a character who is embodied by the actor Ashly Burch - who lends her facial capture and voice to the character - and equally because it was really not good, but it’s being advocated for once again as the future of AI for game development.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Now Burch has responded to the ‘AI Aloy’ at length on their TikTok account. I will let Ashly’s perspective speak for itself, but they make a compelling case regards the importance of protecting the artistic expression while exploring emerging technologies, and how this story has cropped up at a time that SAG-AFTRA’s strike against video game companies is still ongoing due to a lack of protections against AI exploitation.
Netlfix’s New Age of Generative AI Loses it’s Manager After Only Four Months
Last year Mike Verdu made headlines in a less than positive way courtesy of a rather tone-deaf post on LinkedIn as he announced his role as the new ‘VP of GenAI for Games’ at Netflix. It has since been reported on by Stephen Totilo (and summarised by VGC) that Verdu has left the post but four months later, at a time when Netflix’s gaming division is going less than smoothly.
AI Civil War Breaks Out in the Balatro Subreddit?
A weird one to end the news segment on: an internet war broke out across the subreddit of smash-hit indie game Balatro recently due to the actions of one of the (no longer active) moderators of the community who is involved in AI-art mods of the game. It’s a weird one for sure, with community members arguing the server was being “held hostage by a pro-AI weird”, which resulted in the actual developer of the game ‘LocalThunk’ intervening. Great job by Nic Reuben in summarising this one over at RPS.
The Sponsor Update
Okay, all the discourse is out the way, let’s get cracking on what to expect in upcoming content from
. We’ve got a bunch of stuff happening right now, largely due to a little shift in our production pipelines and processes! But critically, you won’t be waiting long for more videos, and more conference updates!Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to AI and Games to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.