GTA Parent Company CEO Says AI Will Make Things Easier, But "It's Not Magic"

AI has become an extremely hot topic these days in nearly every creative industry, and video games are no exception. In a recent earnings call, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked by an analyst if generative AI like ChatGPT would lower the barrier to entry on mobile games.

Zelnick replied that while AI technology will certainly help game developers with certain parts of the creative process, it is not a "magic trick" that can make games from an idea stage alone. He further stated that AI as a technology has certain limits, and that AI as a technology is not able to "look forward" in the same way that a human being can.

"I think the implication of your question is does generative AI allow people who aren't in the business to make mobile hits by say, ChatGPT?" Zelnick said in part. "I come up with a great idea for a new mobile hit. Oh, and by the way, please code it for me, too…And let's just say that, no, you will not be able to create hits that way."

"A machine can predict based on data sets and using massive compute and using large language models," he further stated. "We're all super excited about what we see because we haven't seen before the possibility of doing a natural language query and getting a natural language result. That looks incredibly cool. But to confuse that result with intelligence and creativity is like confusing a magic trick with magic. It's not magic. It's still a magic trick…

"…No AI is not going to allow people to push a button to make a hit. However, AI is going to make certain elements of any process that requires coding easier for everyone, for everyone, not disproportionately for anyone, for everyone."

This isn't the first time that Zelnick has talked publicly about AI--earlier this year, he said that the technology can't make a true GTA rival. The use of generative AI in creative fields has become an even more controversial debate in recent days, with the Writers Guild of America declaring a strike earlier this month in part due to those concerns. ChatGPT might not be smart enough to make its own games yet, but it did solve a simple Fortnite secret without much trouble back in February.