Over the past few days, I've watched my productivity drop (don't tell my boss) a fairly huge amount owing to a sudden explosion of consumer-friendly and highly memeable artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) tools you might have seen on social media.

Services like Craiyon that automatically generate rough AI images based on virtually any input prompt have produced a range of wild and wacky collages across the net, which you can peruse yourself over on subreddits like /r/weirddalle or Twitter accounts like @Dalle2Pics. 

Chatbots and weird AI-generated art are widely known, but what's perhaps more shocking is this more recent wave of sophistication, and how it is already making its way into the general public's consciousness. 

And hey, I admit I have a very surface-level understanding of some of this stuff, but my goal here is to try to outline and extrapolate potential applications we could see appear over the course of the Xbox Series X|S console generation. 

After spending hours generating ridiculous AI stories and pictures to bug my friends and co-workers, I began to dig a little more into how it all works, and what the implications could be for practical applications that move beyond simple memery. 

Microsoft has been making massive investments in the space. We've all heard about the Nuance purchase, which gave Microsoft control over the conversational tools that powers Apple's Siri, but Redmond has been quietly building up its own internal tools and features as it looks to what will most likely end up becoming the next major shift in technology, both for businesses and consumers.