Researching and writing this story gave me massive deja vu, because what Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said today about AI's evolving role in game development sounds like a re-wording of what every other C-suite executive has said about AI in game dev. In case you have somewhere to be, the TLDR is that Zelnick says AI will make game development easier but won't replace human creativity.
I don't want to minimize the importance of Zelnick, the guy at the top of the company funding the biggest entertainment launch of all time with GTA 6, talking about what could be the most consequential technological advancement since the internet, but decades of on-the-job media training have certainly worked their magic in this case.
In Take-Two's latest earnings call, Zelnick is asked about AI's influence on game development, and he begins his answer with this earth-shattering admission: "Look, technology benefits us."
Facing down a group of investors he's forced to answer to as the head of a publicly traded company, it's understandable that Zelnick wants to play it safe when discussing emergent technology, so I guess I should practice gratitude that he gave as lengthy an answer as he did here. Still, pound for pound this might be the highest ratio of words to meaning I've ever seen.
"We've always created our entertainment inside computers, with technology. All advances have benefited us, and I don't expect that that will change. In fact, I hope it'll accelerate. I think at the same time, what we're known for here is the desire to make the best entertainment on earth, and more often than not we succeed," Zelnick says, attributing the creativity of Take-Two studios to "human creativity" and "harnessing technology," which he expects to continue "in the future."
"Undoubtedly, some of the most recent technological advances that you've seen have made it easier to create assets. That is consistent with the story of our business. When I started in interactive entertainment, longer ago than I would like to say, it was really difficult to create an asset in a computer. Today, it's a whole lot easier."
Even here, he doesn't say AI specifically made asset creation easier, just "recent technological advances." Regardless, he draws a line at technology as a replacement for good old fashioned human creativity. "But you know what's not easier? Making a big hit. Making a big hit was hard then, it's hard now, and it's going to be hard in the future. And hit creation remains the purview of human beings."
