It's been done before, both good and bad.
Machine learning is great. It's useful for a lot of things. It can be used as a component in training up complex behavior. There are drawback like it doesn't allow for designers to tune, it is difficult/impossible to understand the relationships the algorithm forms, and so on, but for many things like gesture recognition, voice recognition, and figuring out what a player is doing to reduce it down to a small set of possibilities, they work great. You can use machine learning to train up many different things in games.
Machine learning to train up, then lock the training when you ship? Go for it. Machine learning to train about gestures, and fine-tune to better read what the player is doing? Sure. I've used it on several game titles. I've used it to help identify Wii remote motion, and I've used it in VR to detect hand gestures, until better third-party libraries were developed. It has a lot of great uses.
But there is a critical problem when applying it for “more challenging” play: Machine learning doesn't train to produce fun.
When used against a player, machine learning will adapt to whatever the human is doing, and eventually overcome it. The more you play, the more the computer defeats you. No matter how good the human is, eventually the machine will ALWAYS defeat them, the human will ALWAYS lose. That isn't fun.