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After Microsoft revealed how its AI Copilot can help players beat games, the tech giant released a demo of a Quake II level that was created entirely by AI. The response among fans has ranged from disdain to anger, but the demonstration had a prominent defender: John Carmack, one of the programmers and co-creators of the original Quake.
The Game Awards’ Geoff Keighley shared the demo on X, largely to negative responses. Carmack then came to the defense of the demo. He went on to argue that “AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.”
Microsoft has created an AI-generated replica of Quake II that you can play in browser.
“Every frame is created on the fly by an AI world model.”
Play it here:https://t.co/WGQymDOmsj pic.twitter.com/35MX5aHPbF— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley) April 5, 2025
I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.
My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper…— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 7, 2025
Carmack acknowledged that AI may lead to fewer jobs for game developers before suggesting “it could go the way of farming, where labor-saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone.” He went to address anti-AI sentiment by stating that “‘don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs’ is not a winning strategy.”
