Strauss Zelnick, the chairman and CEO of Take-Two, has once again shared his thoughts on AI in the video game space, and he believes the technology is “great” but people are overstating what it can do.
PC Gamer reported that Zelnick said at the Paley International Council Summit this week that, “AI is a great thing” for “every industry,” including video games. But it’s not a magic wand.
“Will it recreate or create genius? No. Will it create hits? No. It’s a bunch of data with a bunch of compute with a language model attached,” he said.
The executive added that AI will probably be able to help people work more efficiently, but AI is not a forward-looking technology that can actually do anything creative.
“What AI is, is the combination of big datasets with a bunch of compute within natural LLM—a large language model,” Zelnick said. “And by definition, a data set is what? Backward-looking. By definition, creativity is what? Forward-looking. And to the extent that AI appears to be forward-looking, it is what? A predictive model.”
What’s more, Zelnick pushed back on the claim that AI will lead to net losses in jobs, citing historical evidence to make his point. “In 1865, 65% of the US workforce was involved in agriculture. Today we make food for America and food for the rest of the world. And 2% of the workforce is involved with agriculture. And I defy you to find anyone who recently said to you, ‘It’s so horrible, I can’t get a job as a farmer,'” he said.
Before this, Zelnick said the term “artificial intelligence” is an oxymoron because machines cannot learn. “Those are convenient ways to explain to human beings what looks like magic. The bottom line is that these are digital tools and we’ve used digital tools forever.”
Zelnick also previously talked about how people are overstating the power and abilities of AI technologies. “It’s not going to allow someone to say, ‘Please develop the competitor to Grand Theft Auto that’s better than Grand Theft Auto’, and then they just send it out and ship it digitally and that will be that. People will try, but that won’t happen,” Zelnick said.
The executive went on to say that AI technologies may be similar to a hand calculator. Decades ago, parents worried that hand calculators would mean children wouldn’t need to learn math, but that wasn’t the case. “The answer is yes, you still have to learn math, turns out, you absolutely have to learn math, but you have a tool that makes it easier to do. And ChatGPT is the same thing,” he said.
Masahiro Sakurai, who is best known for creating the Kirby franchise and for his work on the Super Smash Bros. series, has said the AAA game development scene is unsustainable but that AI can help. Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield, meanwhile, believes AI can help save the “broken, beaten, battered” games industry.
Sony has been using AI tools for game development for years, crediting machine-learning systems for helping speed up development on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. EA Sports said CFB 25 might not have turned out as good without the developers using machine-learning and AI.
Meanwhile, Candy Crush developers who got laid off by Activision Blizzard said they are being replaced by AI tools they helped create. A recent report from Financial Times said EA might look to further implement AI systems to help ramp up development amid its private sale to an investor consortium. Workers at EA have blasted the proposed sale over a range of concerns, including the possibility of mass layoffs and studio closures.
Regarding concerns from workers about AI across the global games industry overall, 30% of developers cited in the survey mentioned above said they believe generative AI is having a negative impact on the video game business (up 12% from 2023). The surveyed developers cited things like IP theft, energy consumption, and AI program biases as contributing to their feelings toward generative AI.
