At a time when the biggest game developers and publishers in the industry are pushing for increasing AI use in video game development, Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of GTA maker, Rockstar Games, doesn’t think AI use for their hit title would be good.
Take-Two CEO Straus Zelnick
Zelnick believes the impact of GenAI on games like GTA is limited because AI models lack creativity. The Take-Two boss made the comment when he was asked about the impact of AI on game development, while speaking at CNBC’s Technology Executive Council Summit on Tuesday.
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According to the Take-Two boss, AI is “backward-looking” because they are trained on large data sets of old information. He also hinted at the intellectual property hurdle that faces most AI tools.
“Let’s say there were no constraints [on AI]. Could we push a button tomorrow and create an equivalent to the ‘Grand Theft Auto’, and the marketing plan, and here it is?” Zelnick said.
“The answer is no. A, you can’t do that yet, and B, I am of the view that you wouldn’t end up with anything very good. You end up with something pretty derivative. Whether people in Silicon Valley like to hear this or not, AI is big datasets, with lots of compute, attached to a large language model. So, what are datasets by definition? They’re backward-looking.
Anything that involves backward-looking data compute and LLMs, AI is really good for, and that and that applies to lots of things that we do at Take-Two. Anything that isn’t attached to that, it’s going to be really, really bad at…. there is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model, because it is data-driven.”
Zelnick said that the bigger goal of his company is to “create franchises that are permanent”, adding that “The team’s creativity is extraordinary, and what Rockstar Games tries to do, and so far has done over and over again, is create something that approaches perfection.”
The use of AI in video game development remains a thorny issue, particularly because the tools are blamed for the increasing waves of layoffs in the industry.
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