Destructoid Checkpoint: AI isn’t the end, but it is the enemy

Sony is getting annihilated on social media, by influencers, and in the gaming press this week for a host of reasons. From the effective destruction of Destiny, the layoffs at Bungie, the shuttering of the PS3 and Vita stores, and now the announcement that they will be phasing out physical games, the company appears to have willingly entered its villain era. 

Xbox, if rumors are to be believed, is pursuing similar tactics in the removal of physical media, is reportedly entering a brutal layoff phase, and is also looking to shut down games in production and potentially sell or close studios. 

What is actually happening in the industry is hugely complicated, because it ties into various elements of the economic and political landscape, but we are going to break down two major elements that are having a huge impact this week, in an effort to developer a broader understanding of the forces at play here, and the kind of serpent's nest that we are all being walked into right now.

AI is a poison that was willingly ingested

The most important thing to understand about companies like PlayStation and Xbox, even as economic forces turn against them, is that they have brought these problems upon themselves. Both are part of big corporations (although they have very different standings within those corporate structures, with PlayStation being the most important part of Sony and Xbox being the least important part of Microsoft) that are investing heavily into AI.

Both companies would likely have been able to survive their missteps of the last generation—PlayStation with the futile live-service hunt and throwing good money after bad on projects like Concord and the Bungie purchase, Xbox with the Game Pass mistake and a $60 billion millstone around their neck from studio purchases—had they not also arrived in a position where they are getting crushed on component prices.

Those same components are only going up in price so much due to the endless investment in AI tech, desperate to grab a part of an industry that everyone is convinced is not just a bubble. The investment is directly at odds with the aims of both PlayStation and Xbox, but both parent companies are fine with it for opposite reasons.

Xbox is almost entirely expendable to Microsoft. They can invest its cost into pretty much any other department and get a better return than they do right now, and it is likely that they would seriously consider just pulling out of the market if not for the fact that gaming gives them something that they really, really need for the future: training data. Nothing trains AI quite like games, and there are endless moments through the development of AI that companies have proudly proclaimed that their version can play and win everything from GO to StarCraft II. 

For Sony, PlayStation is almost the opposite: potentially seen as a “too big to fail” industry leader that can survive any revenue and player base abrasion from sheer mass and inertia. Gaming can stop being a hobby that everyone can afford, because the people who will be able to afford it can still have a similar wealth level extracted from them. 

If you are sitting there thinking “why are all these companies involving themselves in things that make the business of their subsidiaries so difficult”, that is why. The bigger picture for them is a bright new horizon and an entirely new world where the most profitable and prevalent industry is something that they were the first to arrive at in a meaningful sense, or at least they owned a percentage of whatever did. 

There is an unfortunate nationalistic element to AI

At the moment, a large part of the conversation around AI, at least in pro-AI and industry circles, is the importance of being the people to crack the code, to be the country or company that makes it all work, to benefit from the pole position because the early days of almost all industries boil down to a period of time you could call “winner-take-most.”

This should worry us, not just consumers, but as citizens, as it encourages further entanglement of already preferred tech companies and elected governments, as edges are sought, environmental protections are repealed (to allow the placement of contentious data centers), and vast sums of public money are invested in privately owned businesses. 

Ultimately, the country that gets there “first” cannot hope to control the global impact of the technology in a meaningful sense, no more than the British Empire could hope to monopolize the train. So far, we have seen that the capability of AI will diffuse a good deal faster than the advantage of whatever new technological benchmark will compound, but we will almost certainly hit a tipping point as AI becomes something legitimately clever and capable, rather than what it is right now—mostly overhyped and flawed.

Still, those pesky governments we already mentioned really do seem to place some importance on being the world leader in not just AI, but also the robotics tech that is becoming inextricably linked to its development. Sony is involved with Noetra, a consortium of Japanese firms aiming to develop a homemade AI for the Japanese market, primarily because the current political climate means that nobody wants to be reliant on companies in another country for just about anything right now.

The unfortunate conclusion

If we put these two elements together, we start to realize that gaming is not being run into the ground by people who don’t know what they are doing, so much as being willfully deprioritized by people using the mistakes of the last two hardware generations to justify doing so.

The reason is simple: as long as there is a gaming industry that remains intact and allows corporate interests access to your home and habits, then it will continue to serve its purpose as a vector to train and deliver AI. 

Where my biggest worry kicks in is that you cannot vote with your wallet against a company that has already factored you out, considered you part of the church that is necessary for their metamorphosis, and chalked you down as a loss in revenue that will be replaced. 

The good news is that there is a thriving and healthy industry that exists, and will continue to exist, outside of the major players. The best thing to do is invest your time, money, and attention there. If all these companies are allowed to chase something bigger, then it just makes sense for us, as consumers, to chase something better instead.