Elon Musk has made a series of ambitious predictions about his AI tech and its ability to create video games and movies, although there is a healthy dose of scepticism online around the claims.
In a tweet, the Tesla owner said his xAI game studio will use Grok to release a “great” AI-generated game before the end of next year. The statement was part of a QT of a video showing a rudimentary Call of Duty-style first-person shooter.
Indeed, xAI has an open position for a ‘Video Games Tutor’ who will, for $45/hour - $100/hour, train Grok to produce “engaging, fun, innovative video games, enabling users to explore AI-assisted game design and fostering advancements in interactive entertainment through accurate annotations and iterative testing.”
The question of generative AI’s impact on video games is perhaps the hottest topic within the industry. In June, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney predicted that small teams will soon be able to use AI prompts to make video games on the scale of Nintendo masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Speaking to IGN at Epic’s State of Unreal 2025 event (where CD Projekt revealed a stunning The Witcher 4 tech demo), Sweeney said AI prompts will be “a fundamental part” of game engines, and will result in “entirely new genres of games invented that weren't possible or practical before” without it.
But Larian Studios' publishing director Michael "Cromwelp" Douse responded to Musk’s claim to insist that AI “isn't going to solve the big problem of the industry, which is leadership and vision.”
“Genuinely what this industry needs is not more mathematically produced, psychologically trained gameplay loops, rather more expressions of worlds that folks are engaged with, or want to engage with,” Douse said. “AI has its place as a tool, but we have all the tools in the world and they aren't compensating for the incredible lack of cogent direction.”
Douse continued: “There simply is no resonance without mutual respect. There is no mutual respect without respect for craft. There is no craft without the human touch; the relative skill issue, or 'the exhibition of otherness.' To turn games into digital, emotionless content is to abandon all resonance... which is why people play!”
Musk is of course infamous for making broken promises, not just around Tesla, SpaceX, and his Cybertruck, but societal progress in general. “My predictions about achieving full self-driving have been optimistic in the past,” Musk admitted to investors in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD." Earlier this year he claimed robots will number in the tens of billions and be like “your own personal C-3PO or R2-D2, but even better.”
But his predictions for Grok didn’t stop with video games. In a more recent tweet, Musk claimed Grok will make a movie that is “at least watchable before the end of next year and really good movies in 2027.” That statement came as part of a QT of a six-second video showing generic Hollywood action.
Like with video games, generative AI is the hot topic in the movie industry. Last week, SAG-AFTRA issued a strongly worded statement in response to the emergence of Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated “actress” that had enraged Hollywood. The backlash online has been vociferous, and it remains to be seen if Tilly Norwood actually goes anywhere.
And then there’s the very real danger of copyright infringement associated with the use of generative AI. Over the weekend, OpenAI vowed to give copyright holders “more granular control” over character generation after its Sora 2 app produced a flood of videos that depicted copyrighted characters — including those owned by Nintendo.
Indeed, Musk himself has had problems of his own with this issue. Last year, posts on Twitter containing images of Nintendo’s iconic mascot generated by Grok were pulled offline due to takedown notices.
Meanwhile, Disney and Universal have sued the AI image creator Midjourney, alleging that the company improperly used and distributed AI-generated characters from their movies. Disney also sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI, warning the startup to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
“A lot of the videos that people are going to generate of these cartoon characters are going to infringe copyright,” Mark Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School, told CNBC. “OpenAI is opening itself up to quite a lot of copyright lawsuits by doing this.”
Photo by VINCENT FEURAY/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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