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Former Valve developer Chet Faliszek, who has writing credits on everything from Half-Life to Left 4 Dead, doesn't see the point in Xbox's Copilot AI.
Microsoft recently announced that its Gaming Copilot AI assistant would be making its way to Xbox consoles later this year, following a quiet tenure on PC, mobile, and the ROG Xbox Ally. The feature lets you ask for in-game advice or even game recommendations, with an AI-generated voice then responding to you directly.
Chet Faliszek has now chimed in on the tech via a social media post reacting to Xbox's GDC 2026 presentation, which featured a player asking the Copilot AI for help while in a Sea of Thieves session.
"This is horrible," Faliszek says. "This is horrible in so many different ways and it's something that's just not needed. There's a culture and a community that forms around, like, when there's a hard problem to solve or a puzzle to figure out a game. That's why people come back to the community, that's what people form around and that's why people socialize outside of a game… For the sake of efficiency, Microsoft is removing that and removing that part of the personality of the game, removing the social aspect of the game."
"Do you hate yellow paint in games telling you where to go? Hang on, Xbox has something for you," he adds, referring to the long-running debate around whether game developers should guide players using visual cues, such as yellow paint.
Faliszek goes on to question why anyone would even want to play games while being coddled by an AI program that removes much of the friction and discovery that's already been designed by real people. He also calls out Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech for similar reasons.
Another point of worry comes from where the Xbox Copilot AI is getting its information. "What this AI is doing is, according to the notes that I've read, stealing content from online game guides and regurgitating it here with that little pirate gusto, so you've gotta love that," Faliszek continues.
Microsoft itself says as much: that Copilot "searches for relevant content across the web and then summarizes the information it finds to generate a helpful response," alongside other data sets.
