Elon Musk's AI video game claim sounds pretty far fetched

Another day, another case of Elon Musk using X to make a bold forecast that might have little connection to reality. Just after announcing that X's AI company will launch a Wikipedia rival called Grokipedia within two weeks, the Tesla CEO commented on xAI's ambitions to enter video game development.

Musk wrote on X that the xAI game studio "will release a great AI-generated game before the end of next year". Somehow, I don't think it will be the end of the road for the best game development software quite yet.

'Great' and 'AI-generated' are not two adjectives that usually collate in any field, let alone video games. AI-generated video has been advancing at lightning speed, as demonstrated by the recent release of Sora 2 and the Sora social media app, but it's still a long way from being able to make a movie.

Video games are more complicated, requiring real-time decision-making and functional constraints. A half-decent playable AI video game within a year sounds far fetched, let alone a great one.

Elon first announced xAI's ambitions to enter the video game space almost a year ago in a tweet in which he pledged to end the dominance of big corporations in the gaming industry by using AI to make games for his big corporation. xAI would "make games great again,” he said.

Elon's claim that we'll see the first results by the end of next year was made on his retweet of a post from another user who suggested that Grok will be able to dynamically create video games for each player. The post was accompanied by some bad AI-generated video vaguely resembling the look of a Battlefield-style first-person shooter.

Meanwhile, the xAI jobs board is advertising the post of 'video games tutor', seeking people to help train XAI's systems to build and critique games.

Some are enthusiastic about Musk's plans. “Imagine playing a game that learns your style, adapts to your emotions, and builds new missions in real time. That’s not sci-fi anymore, that’s next year with AI,” one person responded. “No more pre-written storylines, every game will literally think with you,” another person predicts.

But people seem to be forgetting that Elon has a long track record of vastly exaggerating his companies' capabilities. This is the CEO who said that Twitter, now X, could exceed a billion monthly users within 18 months under his control, that the Cybertruck would be a boat and that Tesla would have a fleet of a million fully autonomous robotaxis by 2020.

Some of those commenting on Elon's post have pointed out how dubious the claim is from a technical point of view considering that Grok, and any AI, starts to hallucinate and produce broken code under high use. Others have suggested that there are already too many games with bad AI-generated content.

We've debated generative gaming before. For some 'living games' in which gameplay is generated by players themselves is the next frontier, but it's not clear if it will be possible because of the huge amount of energy it would require, or even if there will be demand for games that are unique to every player and eliminate the social part of the cultural experience of gaming.

If xAI does make a game next year, it won't be a self-generating one for sure. I predict that it won't be “great” either. That's not only because I doubt xAI's ability but because the first of anything is rarely great. And great games are normally built through passion, not by clicking fingers and issuing a deadline.

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