New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma doubles down on 'no AI slop' promise: "We won't have careless output, we won't have derivative work"

Anyone taking over Phil Spencer's job at Xbox would've had it tough, but with her lack of a gaming background and ties to Microsoft's AI push, Asha Sharma's appointment has been met with plenty of concern. She's already tried to extinguish concerns by promising that Xbox "will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop" in an open letter, and now Sharma and freshly promoted chief content officer, Matt Booty, have doubled down on this in a new interview.

Previously the president of CoreAI product at Microsoft, Sharma's appointment is a surprising one - mostly because Sarah Bond, the COO of the Xbox division under Spencer, was tipped as his successor before announcing she was also leaving the company. However, I wouldn't listen to anyone jumping to the conclusion that this move is only going to end in failure.

That doesn't mean myself and many others aren't worried about a push for more AI adoption across Xbox's studios, though. As I mentioned, Sharma's already given some assurances, and while much of her letter read very PR-y to me, the decision to directly use the term 'AI slop,' given Microsoft's love of all things AI right now, was pleasantly candid.

Now, in an interview with Windows Central, she's not only repeated that stance, but built upon it.

"I think that with any new technology, it brings possibilities as a tool, but even more important, especially now - we need to draw lines on what we won't do," she says. "That's what I attempted to do when I shared my opening letter. I will not flood our ecosystem with slop. We won't have careless output, we won't have derivative work. I deeply believe in the words that I shared previously there."

While some first-party studios have been seen to openly use AI tools already, such as Treyarch with Call of Duty Black Ops 7, Booty has also addressed concerns that there will now be some kind of mandatory, widespread adoption of AI across Xbox's teams. He says that developers are "always eager to adopt new technology" and cites how something like Photoshop rapidly became part of people's toolsets, but ensures AI won't be forced upon Xbox employees.

"We've got no pressure from Microsoft, there are no directives on AI coming down," Booty says. "Our teams are free to use any technologies that might be beneficial, whether it's helping write code or check for bugs - things more in the production pipeline. At the end of the day as Asha said, we're committed to art made by people. Technology is only in support of that."

The pair also promise that this shakeup does not mean a radical move away from hardware that would simply see Xbox become a publisher. Of course, with its decision to drop platform exclusivity and the declining sales of Xbox Series X and S consoles in recent years, this is a concern that emerged well before Spencer's departure and Sharma's appointment. But she and Booty say that hardware and first-party studios will still play a big role in Xbox's future.

"I am committed to 'returning to Xbox,'" Sharma says, repeating the phrase she's used on several occasions now since she became CEO, "and that starts with console, that starts with hardware. You will hear more about that soon, we'll have some announcements coming up. You will see us collectively investing here. We also know that there are a lot of players who aren't on console or our hardware, and I want to deliver great games to them, too. I need to learn more about what that can look like, what decisions were made, what we need to do going forward, and I want a little bit of time and space to do that."

It's worth noting that, at no point in this interview, does Sharma or Booty directly mention PC as a platform, specifically, but the latter does name-drop Xbox's handheld.

"Our studio system is fully built around being first-party," Booty adds. "We're not built to just be a publisher. It is core to our partnership with the Microsoft platform, being involved in early hardware decisions - all the work we've done to get games like Gears of War running great on new devices like the Xbox Ally, and so on. It is embedded within our structure, we're not backing away from that. We're committed to being a first-party games publisher in partnership with our first-party platform team."