An Xbox staff member went viral this week for taking to social media to tell “the truth that nobody wants you to know”: that the video game industry is “pretending” to not use AI.
Xbox Business Strategist, Brandon Stirrup, tweeted to say he’d used AI to create a “little bad game” after just three hours of work. He then used that as a springboard to talk about AI in gaming, and how the technology is more widely used than the industry lets on.
In his posts, which have been preserved on Reddit, Stirrup insisted that “gaming is the only industry pretending not to use AI,” and, “If you’re a game developer refusing to believe that AI has a place in your future, you should not be in the business of being a business.”
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Stirrup added: “Look if I’m fired tomorrow it will be because I told you the truth that nobody wants you to know. You can make a game with a simple prompt and yes you can make custom, tailored games. Everything you want in a game is right there for the taking, for better or worse.
“I’m happy to take the hit if it means hundreds at Xbox can stop pretending that they’re not using AI. It’s time to accept and move forward.”
“I love Xbox and Microsoft and I have spent 10+ years proving this,” he added. “My goal is to get this over with so we can move on as a company, despite the fact that some will persecute me for this: we use AI, just as all companies do in 2026.”
The comments sparked a flood of responses on social media, which account
AI is the hottest topic in the industry. Fortnite developer Epic Games has already declared that code for its upcoming Star Wars shooter is going to be entirely written by AI, with the game director even declaring “no handwritten code” for the game. Epic boss Tim Sweeney has spent much of the last week trumpeting AI on social media, even as some hit out at the company’s plans and its “vibe-coded” Epic Games launcher.
Capcom also had a presentation recently where it presented ‘REX’ as a way to help the RE engine continue to mature, using, you guessed it, AI. However, the Resident Evil developer subsequently clarified thatit would just be integrating AI tools to boost “the efficiency and productivity of the game development process,” rather than using generative AI to create assets and code wholesale.
AI is also being increasingly used for decompilation and modding. There’s been an entire wave of AI-assisted mashup mods on X / Twitter that continues to gain traction. Plus, AI has become such a big part of the decomp scene that it’s forced at least one community focused on manual decompilation to go offline. Microsoft has responded to this wave of AI in the modding community by launching Xbox Labs, which aims to do a lot of the same things that the community is already doing, including porting games to browsers.
Perhaps more impactful — or damaging, if you’re in the business of selling video game consoles — is the role of AI in jailbreaking hardware. Sony is currently facing the possibility of a PS5 jailbreak on the eve of the launch of GTA 6, which could, theoretically at least, open the door to people making Rockstar’s game available on PC. Rockstar parent company Take-Two would likely take a dim view of the PS5’s encryption if that were to happen.
As for Stirrup’s claims, the only aspect of AI that game developers have meaningfully distanced themselves from by large is art and asset generation. As AI tools continue to mature, they’re only going to be used in games more often. Heck, even Epic’s Unreal Engine, which is used in every other game these days,has generative AI tools built into the UI. So, if this is the state of AI in gaming when developers are “pretending” to not use it, what will it look like when these companies stop “pretending?”
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
