The US government’s use of AI-generated Halo imagery on social media has absolutely been a power-play to appeal to like-minded American gamers.
As if there were any doubt, White House deputy press secretary Kush Desai told journalist Alyssa Mercante overnight: “Yet another war ended under President Trump’s watch – only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers.”
Desai’s comments were made in relation to an image tweeted by the Department of Homeland Security, which showed a picture of a Halo ring world and two spartan soldiers in a Warthog jeep – one driving it and the other on top of it, operating the machine-gun turret. The soldiers appear below the words “Destroy the Flood” and a call to join the Immigration Customs Enforcement group, ICE.
The Flood are the primary antagonists in the Halo franchise – a parasitic lifeform which overran the galaxy. The reference here in the ICE promotional image, then, is depressingly clear: the Flood represents the immigrants ICE seeks to forcefully detain.
The US government’s use of AI-generated Halo imagery started at the weekend, after Microsoft announced a remake of the Halo: Combat Evolved campaign will be coming to PC, Xbox and – for the first time – PlayStation. In response, US games retailer GameStop posted a memey statement declaring the console wars dead – the inference being that now Halo, the series that epitomised the rivalry between Xbox and PlayStation, was heading to Sony’s machine, the console wars were effectively over.
The White House X account responded to this with an AI-generated image of Donald Trump as Master Chief, holding a blue energy sword and saluting in front of an American flag, which doesn’t have the correct amount of state-stars on it. “Power to the Players,” the tweet read.
GameStop replied with another AI-generated Halo image showing Trump’s face in Master Chief’s helmet, and holographic AI companion Cortana as Vice President JD Vance nearby. GameStop hasn’t tweeted since.
All eyes now are on Microsoft and whether it will do anything about the unsanctioned use of AI-generated Halo imagery to promote political causes such as this. Microsoft has not commented on the matter and I expect never will, though I’ve asked through official channels all the same.
However, we can find depressing precedent in the recent lack of action (or effect) by Nintendo’s legal team to do anything about the US Department of Homeland Security using imagery and music from Pokémon to promote ICE causes. The Pokémon Company even publicly confirmed it had not sanctioned the use of Pokémon assets in this way, further underlining its apparent powerlessness to change the situation.
That, then, is what I expect this latest Halo-related display is: another power-play. Another demonstration that as unsanctioned and abhorrent as the use of the Halo imagery is, and enormously powerful as Microsoft is, it probably won’t be able to force the US government to take it down.
