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New Xbox CEO on AI: "We will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop."

Topher said:
Then you haven't been paying attention. Nadella made a big deal about saying "slop" and now here she is using it. To me, that's trying to hard to fit in. Either way, what's your problem? It's like you are taking this personally.

techcrunch.com

Microsoft's Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as 'slop' | TechCrunch

Nadella wants us to think of AI as a human helper instead of a slop-generating job killer. New data for 2026 indicates he could be right.
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
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I can assure you I follow the industry far closer than you and know infinitely more about it than you do.

I can see he used the word in a short blog post. I don't see how that's making a big deal of it, but the articles talking about the blog post certainly did. He, in fact, uses it in a very casual way. The blog is so short and naturally you haven't read it lol, none of you read anything.

Anyhow my point still stands - the term and the problem it's describing as entirely ubiquitous.

She's made a very understandable and hardly mysterious decision to immediately talk about it because she's aware that some people will have a concern about it given her previous position. If she hadn't addressed it then it would still be the number one thing many people would be discussing.
 
IntentionalPun said:
Some of the most talented people I work with in tech are "brown women." Some of you need to really get over this DEI nonsense. Microsoft has become less and less white male lead over the last 20 years and multiplied their success over and over.
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During Nadella's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's stock has increased in value by basically 1000%. He has had one of the best runs as the CEO of a company in all of corporate history.
 
ZehDon said:
Oh yeah, they're gonna force AI down our fucking throats at every opportunity, aren't they?
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Of course they are. No question on that.

you-bet-your-ass-angry-video-game-nerd.gif
 
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Montauk said:
During Nadella's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's stock has increased in value by basically 1000%. He has had one of the best runs as the CEO of a company in all of corporate history.
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MS stock has been great for my investment portfolio but utter shit for video games.

Considering that folks here talk about gaming, MS stock has no bearing on the current discussion.

Hell, Nadela's AI obsession, spending and failures might yet bite MS in the rear.
 
Bkdk said:
Know What? AI generated char art is certainly much better than the protags by MS and Sony in recent years by a large margin. Will absolutely have better looking chars, much better than recent examples like avowed, yotei, outer worlds 2, concord, marathon, starfield. So for character designs I fully support using AI by western devs.

As for the asian ones, I don't have absolute proof but pretty sure many of them use AI to generate the character concept art with artists doing some final touches to make the chars from 7 to 8-9/10. AI helped a lot in character art development.
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It's sad but true. I can't name a single MS or Sony female main character in the past 12 years (barring Eve from Stellar Blade) that doesn't look like a boring safe horny character or just straight up looks like a tranny mutant.
 
Topher said:
Then you haven't been paying attention. Nadella made a big deal about saying "slop" and now here she is using it. To me, that's trying to hard to fit in. Either way, what's your problem? It's like you are taking this personally.

techcrunch.com

Microsoft's Nadella wants us to stop thinking of AI as 'slop' | TechCrunch

Nadella wants us to think of AI as a human helper instead of a slop-generating job killer. New data for 2026 indicates he could be right.
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
Click to expand...
The articles that went around about that blog post aren't particulalarly accurate.

The actual blog post mentioned "slop" once and it's not very well paraphrased by all of the tech "news" sites: https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

A new concept that evolves "bicycles for the mind" such that we always think of AI as a scaffolding for human potential vs a substitute. What matters is not the power of any given model, but how people choose to apply it to achieve their goals. We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our "theory of the mind" that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other. This is the product design question we need to debate and answer.
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Translation: we should focus on making good tooling not what some people are producing with it (slop).

It's an admission that a lot of people are producing crap with AI tools, and that is echoed by the new Xbox CEO.
 
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These folks always talk a good talk, always.

I see zero reason to be happy about this, we'll simply have to wait and see if this is actually good news or absolutely not.
 
StereoVsn said:
MS stock has been great for my investment portfolio but utter shit for video games.

Considering that folks here talk about gaming, MS stock has no bearing on the current discussion.

Hell, Nadela's AI obsession, spending and failures might yet bite MS in the rear.
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But I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the context of whether people are competent to do their jobs on the basis of them not being white. Look at the context.

The insane amounts of openly racist bile that get instantly spat out when this man (and others like him, see the subject of the thread) is just crazy, much of it implying that he's an incompetent moron who has succeeded because of his race rather than an extremely successful CEO has added trillions of dollars in value to his company and has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Computer Science and an MBA.
 
Montauk said:
But I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the context of whether people are competent to do their jobs on the basis of them not being white. Look at the context.

The insane amounts of openly racist bile that get instantly spat out when this man (and others like him, see the subject of the thread) is just crazy, much of it implying that he's an incompetent moron who has succeeded because of his race rather than an extremely successful CEO has added trillions of dollars in value to his company and has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering, a Masters in Computer Science and an MBA.
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Nadella on one hand has been good for stock for MS, on the other hand he has been terrible to culture within MS, made that 18 months contractor policy a done deal, and the company under his watch has been producing a lot of slop, especially lately.

He is certainly very competent but that has nothing to do with gaming. And the new President of the Gaming division has no visible trace of capability in this industry either.

So we shall see what happens but most likely it's going to be shit.

That said, Phil has had a disastrous career at MS even before his CEO role at Xbox when he cut bunch of gaming studios in second half of X369 Gen and Sarah Bond just did nothing.
 
IntentionalPun said:
Some of the most talented people I work with in tech are "brown women." Some of you need to really get over this DEI nonsense. Microsoft has become less and less white male lead over the last 20 years and multiplied their success over and over.

Considering how much everyone here hates Spencer, Ryan and Hulst.. you'd think you'd grow a clue.
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Incompetence is color blind. I've worked with plenty good and bad men and women of various races and ethnicities. My biggest concern with this hire is her experience doesn't align well for this business unit which is struggling. Honestly, they need a turnaround expert even more than someone with video game industry experience.
 
Montauk said:
I can assure you I follow the industry far closer than you and know infinitely more about it than you do.

I can see he used the word in a short blog post. I don't see how that's making a big deal of it, but the articles talking about the blog post certainly did. He, in fact, uses it in a very casual way. The blog is so short and naturally you haven't read it lol, none of you read anything.

Anyhow my point still stands - the term and the problem it's describing as entirely ubiquitous.

She's made a very understandable and hardly mysterious decision to immediately talk about it because she's aware that some people will have a concern about it given her previous position. If she hadn't addressed it then it would still be the number one thing many people would be discussing.
Click to expand...
I think you have a very good point where you describe that people will obviously talk about it so getting ahead of it makes sense for her especially. I completely agree there. I mean she is literally coming from AI if I understand correctly.

But I feel like you aren't giving enough weight to Nadella using similar language, I just dont think people at his level really give casual statements that align up with today's so well. That said, I don't think it matters. I'm just chilling on a Friday night and still agree, wholeheartedly, that it made sense for her to get ahead of it,

Anyway, I hope the new people turn things around and we start getting more positive news eom gaming. A little wild to see an AI exec taking over and downplaying AI concerns within a company like MS. But it doesn't mean she isn't ready for the job. Heck, AI experience may be more important than a lot of people (me too Skynet scares me) want to believe at this point. I just hope she has or develops a good eye for what people would really enjoy playing and who can get those games made.
 
NickFire said:
I think you have a very good point where you describe that people will obviously talk about it so getting ahead of it makes sense for her especially. I completely agree there. I mean she is literally coming from AI if I understand correctly.

But I feel like you aren't giving enough weight to Nadella using similar language, I just dont think people at his level really give casual statements that align up with today's so well. That said, I don't think it matters. I'm just chilling on a Friday night and still agree, wholeheartedly, that it made sense for her to get ahead of it,

Anyway, I hope the new people turn things around and we start getting more positive news eom gaming. A little wild to see an AI exec taking over and downplaying AI concerns within a company like MS. But it doesn't mean she isn't ready for the job. Heck, AI experience may be more important than a lot of people (me too Skynet scares me) want to believe at this point. I just hope she has or develops a good eye for what people would really enjoy playing and who can get those games made.
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The downplaying AI concerns was what I was referencing when I said she was "trying too hard". I'm still scratching my head as to why that was met with such aggressive defensiveness. In two days time we will have all forgotten about this stuff. It really doesn't mean much at all.

As for the new CEO, too early to tell. She is certainly a well qualified corporate executive. Will she be a good gaming corporate executive? Hard to say. Steve Jobs once thought the CEO of Pepsi was perfect for Apple. Turns out, not so much. Not saying that's the case here, but I just don't think these leadership positions are plug and play.
 
The AI slop comment is interesting. As someone who's getting more into the weeds with AI and understanding it in a much more detailed way. I understand her statement.

There's machine learning and deep thinking and then there is AI chat bots and image generators. I'd imagine her and Satya are talking about the latter and they want to genuinely use the tool for what it's best at.

However that's just my opinion there is every bit of chance they see copilot they want to build around which of course is a fairly poor AI chat bot that can complete rudimentary automated tasks in windows.

If the plan is an easier way to get that into their products to gather data then I'm afraid this won't be very good for Xbox as a home console.

I don't think they will rip it all up and do live service slop though which is a saving grace.
 
TrebleShot said:
The AI slop comment is interesting. As someone who's getting more into the weeds with AI and understanding it in a much more detailed way. I understand her statement.

There's machine learning and deep thinking and then there is AI chat bots and image generators. I'd imagine her and Satya are talking about the latter and they want to genuinely use the tool for what it's best at.

However that's just my opinion there is every bit of chance they see copilot they want to build around which of course is a fairly poor AI chat bot that can complete rudimentary automated tasks in windows.

If the plan is an easier way to get that into their products to gather data then I'm afraid this won't be very good for Xbox as a home console.

I don't think they will rip it all up and do live service slop though which is a saving grace.
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I've been in the weeds at work with AI as well. Mostly working with Azure Open AI and Foundry. As you've pointed out, there are a lot of avenues to AI so I think the message here is really just trying to distance the negative connotations of AI that a lot of gamers have from her past work at Microsoft. That was the one thing most grabbed on to from the very beginning. How much of it, if any, will actually be worked into Xbox? Hard to say. I imagine that's going to be part of their next-gen reveal.
 
Montauk said:
During Nadella's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's stock has increased in value by basically 1000%. He has had one of the best runs as the CEO of a company in all of corporate history.
Click to expand...

Most of that is because they own a chunk of OpenAI.

Hopefully OpenAI implodes before they are able to unload it to retail morons.
 
TrebleShot said:
The AI slop comment is interesting. As someone who's getting more into the weeds with AI and understanding it in a much more detailed way. I understand her statement.

There's machine learning and deep thinking and then there is AI chat bots and image generators. I'd imagine her and Satya are talking about the latter and they want to genuinely use the tool for what it's best at.

However that's just my opinion there is every bit of chance they see copilot they want to build around which of course is a fairly poor AI chat bot that can complete rudimentary automated tasks in windows.

If the plan is an easier way to get that into their products to gather data then I'm afraid this won't be very good for Xbox as a home console.

I don't think they will rip it all up and do live service slop though which is a saving grace.
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Considering number of issues I have seen over last year with MS various releases in the Enterprise space coinciding with their push for more AI use in dev… I will take anything any MS exec says with a grain of salt the size of Utah's Salt Lake.

All MS Execs have AI metrics on their PDRs.
 
Wow, how did she become CEO with only some 2yrs in Microsoft. Granted most executives in Xbox are not doing great but still I am not sure she deserves it.
 
Neo_game said:
Wow, how did she become CEO with only some 2yrs in Microsoft. Granted most executives in Xbox are not doing great but still I am not sure she deserves it.
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I hate to be that guy but I think it's pretty obvious. Either way, I don't see her staying there for too long, this will be a stepping stone position for her.

Plus if they go full 3rd party and stop trying to sell consoles the job will be a lot easier for her.
 
Neo_game said:
Wow, how did she become CEO with only some 2yrs in Microsoft. Granted most executives in Xbox are not doing great but still I am not sure she deserves it.
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yeah. She is completely clueless about gaming...and that is the point. Because gaming for MS (especially now) is a worthless burden; it's a division whose sole purpose is to be an experiment to try to make AI work in a big scale. of course, goes without saying...shit aint gonna work at all
 
Montauk said:
She's made a very understandable and hardly mysterious decision to immediately talk about it because she's aware that some people will have a concern about it given her previous position. If she hadn't addressed it then it would still be the number one thing many people would be discussing.
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She's preemptively damage controlling for what everyone, except you, knows is coming down the pipe to fill the slop trough for the "cattle" to consume.
 
I don't see the point of this hire unless the goal is to kill the division. You hired someone:

with no gaming background at work
is constantly job hopping
is too young to even have legit gaming experience, like she wouldn't have even played a lot of Microsoft's products when she was a kid.

It's like hiring someone to run a car company that previously was selling insurance and has never driven a car before, lol. Like it makes zero sense.
 
IntentionalPun said:
Over half of this forum can't discuss a woman without focusing on looks or fuckability.
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Ok, let's discuss the impressive achievements and resume of this woman and whether or not she's a good fit for the position. You can't claim with a straight face she was chosen for her professional background. I'd love to read the conversations among MS Studios heads right now.

And yes, nepotism is a thing in the corporate world, we are not discovering America by acknowledging this in 2026.
 
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