They present Muse as a “generative AI model of a videogame” that you’d train to “learn about older games”. Which seems a very bold claim to begin with.
If this is anything like that, this is not a way to preserve the original game, it’s an attempt at reproducing (parts of?) it. And since generative AI is involved, there is no reason to believe it will be a faithful recreation.
Of course this could all be marketing bullshit, and for all we know their AI is just another coding assistant AI that they might use to create remakes. And then they’ll only be as faithful as the team making it can or will do it, as has always been the case with remakes.
Anyway, remaking is not preserving.
Edit : was a bit slow trying to make my point, seeing now your edit. Yep, that’s exactly what I got from this too.
According to their Wikipedia, Techdirt only accepted money from Charles Koch’s foundation for a lawsuit (amongst other donors), and are owned by Floor64.
Floor 64’s website only has 2 people listed in their management team, but I couldn’t dig up if either are linked to the Koch’s (I was pretty cursory about it though).
The article was worth a read for this quote alone:
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.”
One thing Phil Spencer does not seem to care about is emulation. There are already Xbox and PlayStation emulators that allow access to more of both platforms back catalogues than any of the current generation consoles are capable of…
Xbox could build cloud based emulators off the open source tools already available and make their entire Xbox back catalogue accessible to current users to stream. They could help improve the tools to ensure greater and greater compatibility for titles and then it would be there forever.
The reason it doesn’t happen is money. They dont see money in game preservation so they dont bother beyond a few big name nostalgia hits. Muse AI isn’t about game preservation, its about game development - they’re just pissing around with game preservation to feed it content as a punt on the future for it somehow making game development cheaper.
I can’t say I buy this fully. From a marketkng standpoint, it seems like a huge win: “Subscribe to game pass ultimate and you get thousands of games old and new, up by thousands from last year”. From a financial standpoint, running those emulators should be a lot less compute heavy than current games so it should be cheaper.
The only real issue I see here is legal. Licensing the rights to distribute the games via streaming for their entire back catalogue can’t be easy.
AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize Mars with a few prompts on ChatGPT.
Yet their AI is still incapable of answering two prompts consecutively without making shit up, or drawing a human without turning it into an eldritch abomination.
Game preservation could be fixed with open source emulators and fixing copyright laws so that I’m allowed to download a game nobody has profited from in two decades, but that’s not appealing to big corporations.
Yeah, instead game preservation is being solved by abandonware and copyright infringement.
Legal open source software is doing the heavy lifting, and then torrenting is sharing by he files. But there is a huge risk as there is no safety net to preserve the niche and unpopular games.
The game publishers and broken copyright laws are blocks to preservation but fortunately people are just doing it anyway. And the more the big companies push against it (including targeting emulation systems for current systems) the more they push it underground and out of any control they might have had. Typical greed and stupidity.
AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer
And yet they don’t. Well, we already know how to solve world hunger. Just not a willingness.
Researchers are using AI as an additional tool for discovering new drugs, but the techbros and pharmabros are going to be over charging for any new cures even if they become cheaper to discover.
Guys, it’s okay. Sure, it sounds bad that we somehow let the complete works of William Shakespeare disappear from the planet. But we have a new data center with a billion monkeys on typewriters. Give them some time, and they’re bound to stumble upon that old stuff eventually.
Edit : love that one guy who found a couple people critical of one of the most ridiculous claim about generative AI yet and decided to downvote everyone without a word.
AI can make Shakespeare BETTER! Like it can put it in modern text speak, and shorten it down to fit in a 30 second tiktok, plus give space for ad breaks and temu product placement. AI will help enhance user engagement with Shakespeare and also leverage new monetisation options and cross platform synergies.
All we have to do is let people copyright AI made content because ultimately it wasn’t Shakespeare that did the hard work, it was the AI tech Bros who transformed it into a modern content meme and raised 3rd quarter profits.
They surrendered when they thought day one console buyers and people who liked gimmicky dance game peripherals were one and the same, and never really caught back up.
Since then they’ve been pushing Game Pass hard, but that mythical era where you’d just need a TV, internet and a gamepad just never arrived for them. Streaming games is probably fine for a lot of casual gamers, but the casual gamers are already on mobile and tend to spend very little on games. Far too little for Game Pass Ultimate to make sense for them.
And I’m really unconvinced that day one Game Pass games are sustainable. Even with their piss-poor output over the last few years.
I also don’t like that games are no longer going down much in price over time. It seems everyone is far too happy to leave things at launch price to make subscriptions and crap sales seem like better value.
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