During a talk at The Paley Center for Media in the San Francisco Bay Area on changing consumer trends in media, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick spoke about the current state of AI technologies in game development and how they will influence games in the future.
Along with expanding on his views on the nascent technology, its limitations compared to human creativity, and how he believes it will lead to more employment opportunities, a theory that runs counter to predictions of job losses made by other executives. He said this while responding to a question from fellow panelist Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia about the future of employment in a world with generative AI. “It will not reduce employment, it will increase employment,” he said. “Technology always increases productivity, which in turn increases GDP, which in turn increases employment. And you know, in 1865, 65% of the US workforce was involved in agriculture.”
“Today, we produce food for America and the rest of the world, and 2% of the workforce is involved in 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,’ and employment is way up. AI is a great thing. It’s a great thing for every industry. Will it create a genius? No. Will it create hits? No. It’s a bunch of data with a bunch of computers with a language model attached.”
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These followed other comments where he described generative AI as a “backward-looking” technology, unable to excel in a “forward-looking” creative field.
“You have to look at it as a tool set. Our business has been involved with digital tools since its inception,” said the CEO of the company soon to release Grand Theft Auto VI. “I think we’ll probably be able to create a bunch of efficiency, and we’re already trying to do that. We’re reviewing 200 different opportunities at any given time, but what AI is not going to do—because remember, what AI is, is the combination of big data sets with a bunch of computers within a natural LLM, a large language model. And by definition, a data set is backward-looking, while creativity is forward-looking. To the extent that AI appears to be forward-looking, it is what a predictive model is.”
“We have a combination of metadata with a parlor trick.”
The growing impact and potential of AI technologies have been a topic of increasing interest and concern for developers in the video game industry. With industry layoffs becoming a recurring occurrence in recent years, some developers are looking to pivot by bringing more AI technologies into the workflow to expand productivity.
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The Take-Two CEO made a point of clarifying that AI is a tool for human workers and that it is, in effect, a “parlor trick” that leverages predictive data.
“The reason [AI] is so extraordinary right now is because what we have is a combination of metadata with a parlor trick; we’re all going to get used to it,” he said. “We’re getting really used to it in the same way that if this were 25 years ago and I handed you today’s version of Google, you would have been blown away by what it could do for you. But now it’s like, ‘yeah, I searched again’—this is all very standard, and [AI] will be standard, this is the future of technology.”
Currently, multiple industries across tech, media, and other fields are enduring waves of layoffs (some at Zelnick’s own company) that have disrupted careers and projects. However, Strauss remained optimistic that the technology would ultimately be helpful and that it would eventually expand employment further.