Microsoft Unveils Muse AI Tool For Game Development

There is never a shortage of opinions on AI. To some, it can be an incredibly useful tool, while others fear it will remove humans from jobs. Today, Microsoft has unveiled Muse, a new AI tool that should help developers with future projects. Of course, as it stands, it’s still very much in its infancy.

Muse is essentially a tool that can understand and program game development both in visuals and controller actions. The way this worked out is Microsoft teamed up with Ninja Theory to help train the AI tool by using the game Bleeding Edge. Using countless hours of training, the result is that Muse can consistently generate a couple of minutes of gameplay sequences. As mentioned, it’s still in its infancy, so we’re dealing with 300×180 pixels. But if you’ve been following AI advancements, you know these things can take off quickly, and it might not be long before Muse becomes a viable tool for developers.

In our research, we focus on exploring the capabilities that models like Muse need to effectively support human creatives. I’m incredibly proud of our teams and the milestone we have achieved, not only by showing the rich structure of the game world that a model like Muse can learn, but also, and even more importantly, by demonstrating how to develop research insights to support creative uses of generative AI models. – Katja Hofmann Senior Principal Research Manager and lead of the Microsoft Research Game Intelligence team

Meanwhile, as reported by VentureBeat, another area where Muse could come into play is game preservation. While this can help aid in game development in various areas, the idea of using a tool like this to help keep back catalog of games going strong might be appealing to some players. By using this Muse, there’s a chance that preserving classic games and making them playable on modern platforms could become more streamlined.

But we’ll have to wait and see how this AI tool evolves. Microsoft is apparently making this open source so more hands can get on this project and help make further advancements to the tool. So, again, while this tool is not making complete video game projects quite yet, it’s a notable tool that could make a significant impact down the road. We’ll just have to wait to see how it shapes up. That said, if you want to see some gameplay footage from the tool, Microsoft has showcased several clips on their official research blog post.