The head of development at Xbox Graphics posted a job posting about the division’s open positions and included an image generated by artificial intelligence. This prompted criticism on social media, as Microsoft recently laid off thousands of employees, in part because of its focus on AI.
The head of development at Xbox Graphics posted a job posting about the division’s open positions and included an image generated by artificial intelligence. This prompted criticism on social media, as Microsoft recently laid off thousands of employees, in part because of its focus on AI.
The image that sparked outrage on social media was posted by Mike Matzel on LinkedIn. It shows a woman sitting at a computer typing code — displayed on the back of the monitor, not on the screen. The text in the post and in the image advertises open positions at Xbox Graphics.
LinkedIn and other social media users reacted to the post with a mixture of surprise and outright anger — many comments criticizing the image quality and timing of the post — which came just weeks after mass layoffs at Xbox as Microsoft decided to invest more money in AI development.
Although, apparently, this is not an official post from Microsoft itself, but rather the initiative of an individual employee, it provoked almost 200 comments, almost all of which contain harsh criticism of the vacancy announcement. Even from colleagues from Microsoft itself and experts from the gaming industry.
«Do you think this image conveys the idea of ‘this is a company where we value people who can make things attractive’?» wrote one of them.
«Posting this a few days after MS laid off 9,000 game development employees, including an AI-generated image of a monitor standing backwards… Dude, look what’s around here,» the Meta employee wrote.
«This is just shameful. An image created by artificial intelligence (SCREEN IS BEHIND THE MONITOR) to promote an art post,» wrote a Ubisoft employee.
Several other comments simply mocked the image, and one even suggested that the image was posted intentionally — to show why good employees are needed.
Recall that in early July, Microsoft confirmed that it was laying off 9,100 employees, or about 4% of its staff, as part of another round of layoffs. The Xbox division, known as Microsoft Gaming, as well as some already announced games, were hit hard.
It later became known that these cuts at Microsoft may be an attempt by the corporation to cut costs after huge investments in artificial intelligence .
Mike Matzel is not the first Microsoft employee to be accused of insensitivity after large-scale layoffs. Earlier, one of the top Xbox managers was criticized on social media for suggesting the use of generative AI to make it easier to deal with layoffs.
