An interview with the project head for release day

“And then you feed that into a machine learning system, and you say ‘this type of colour and this type of pattern is this’ - you feed it in, and you get everything back, you look at the results, and then you have human intervention again. You basically say: ‘Oh OK, got this wrong.’ And then you retrain it. We did that in four different stages.”

What does that process of human intervention look like in practice, I asked? What’s the trick to avoiding the kind of uncanny distortion we often see intoday’s prompt-based generated art, to say nothing of the previous game’scosmically horrible terrain deformations?

“It’s just picture analysis, really,” Neumann said. “It’s just a lookup table and you say, is this sand? We defined, I think, 26 different surface types - red sand or brown sand to asphalts, those types of things. And I don’t know about distortion but you know, you basically say, ‘oh this one is this, and this one is this’, and it got some stuff wrong sometimes, you know - it understood gravel to be sand. And then you have to retrain it a little bit.”

One inevitable fear I had, on hearing about this system, is whether the expanded role of machine learning has come at the cost of jobs. While it varies by the tool, discipline and company, there’s a link between today’s AI tools and corporate cost-cutting, with larger video game publishers such as Microsoftdismissing tens of thousands of peopleeven as theyspend billionson software that theoretically automates aspects of game development, such as the creation of art assets for buildings and vehicles.

While 5GB an hour is still quite a chunk, Neumann feels the expanded streaming system is more efficient from the player’s perspective, because it means theinitial downloadcan be a lot smaller - around 50GB. It also means you won’t have to download massive expansions over the next few years - instead, the game’s representation of Earth can be overhauled and expanded remotely, with the new bits being streamed to each player as required.

That open-endedness is worrisome because generative AI at large has a mounting energy and emissions cost, and Microsoft especially are trying to walk the line between adhering torelatively ambitious carbon negative planswhile also plunging inordinate sums into technologies such as OpenAI’s various roided-up chatbots and Microsoft’s flagship Copilot app.