I don’t like going onto LinkedIn. It’s possibly the worst social media platform, considering it’s evolved beyond its primary function of helping people find jobs to becoming a website where people post the most insufferable capitalist bootlicking brainrot that language can muster. It’s a place where people meticulously curate their personal brands for maximum career progression, and because corporate culture is insufferable, the people with the most reach are often also the most annoying.
LinkedIn is also, apparently, the platform of choice forXboxemployees to make fools of themselves. I don’t mean to single these people out, really – lots of people make fools of themselves on LinkedIn every day, that’s just the culture over there – but these particular gaffes are especially painful to witness because of their timing and the overwhelmingly negative industry reaction towards them.
Is Everybody At Microsoft AI-Pilled?
You’ve almost certainly heard about Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs by now, which have led to Xbox studio closures, game cancellations, and funding pulled from publishing deals. The repercussions have spread beyond just the laid off employees to outsourcing teams who were contracted to work on Xbox projects,causing indirect layoffs and panic across the wider gaming industry.
It was very shortly after these layoffs that Matt Turnbull, executive producer at Xbox Game Studios Publishing,suggested in a now deleted post on LinkedInthat his laid off colleagues “don’t have to go it alone” – they can “use LLM AI tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss”.
Turnbull acknowledged that “these types of tools engender strong feelings in people”, but he wanted to “offer the best advice I can under the circumstances”. I’m not particularly interested in clowning this specific executive, considering he’s already taken down the post. However, I do think it’s quite telling that Xbox executives would rather offer advice on what prompts to feed an AI than sympathy for their colleagues who are suddenly out of jobsandbonuses promised to them.
You’d think this would have been a lesson for all who saw it, but only a couple of days ago, yet another Xbox employee has been yelled at on LinkedIn for posting about AI. Mike Matsel, a principal development lead at the Xbox graphics team,posted that the team is hiring. The post was accompanied by an obviously AI-generated graphic that showed a woman in a green sweater coding. you may tell she’s coding because the stuff on her monitor is inexplicably shown on the back of her screen. Cool!
The reactions to this, too, were furious. At least two people said the words “shame on you”. One commenter asked, “Does everyone left at Xbox have brain damage?” There were a couple ‘this monitor is an Xbox’ jokes. One comment was just the poop emoji.
Microsoft’s AI Push Already Has Consequences
There are a lot of reasons why these two posts have struck such a nerve with people. The games industry is in a bad place, and there’s alotof solidarity among developers right now struggling to find stable work. Posts like this, which are in bad taste, are bound to provoke strong negative reactions from people who’ve watched Microsoft enact layoff after layoff.
But these posts are in particularly bad taste because of Microsoft’s recent pivot to AI. This round of layoffs happened afterMicrosoft announcedit was on track to invest $80 billion in AI tech in the 2025 financial yearalone. It’s possible that Xbox made these layoffs despite record revenues in 2024 becauseit’s trying to channel money towards its AI pivot.
Moreover, it seems that Microsoft is now forcing some employees to use generative AI tools in their jobs.Business Insider reportsthat a memo sent to some managers said, “AI is now a fundamental part of how we work… using AI is no longer optional – it’s core to every role and every level”. The memo also said that AI “should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact”. Some teams are considering including formal metrics to evaluate AI use in performance reviews for the next fiscal year.
In fact, we’ve seen reports thatthe Microsoft-owned King allegedly replaced employees with AI tools those employees created.
It’s unlikely that Microsoft’s policies on AI use extend to posts that employees make on their personal social media platforms, but they are perhaps indicative of the prevalence of an annoyingly AI-forward culture at Xbox despite the resistance of so many of their colleagues within the industry. As Microsoft continues to push AI on its employees, the gaming industry, and the world, we’re probably going to start seeing a lot of this on the regular.
