Take-Two has hardened its stance against AI use in video games, as the parent company of Rockstar Games gets rid of all of its internal experts.
As the rest of the world embraces AI with apparently no thought to its wider financial, societal or ethical impact – or trivial things like whether it works reliably or not – the video game world has, in general, been surprisingly sceptical.
Some publishers have been as mindlessly enthusiastic (you can guess who before even clicking that link) as you’d expect, but others have been more cautious. In some cases, such as with Nintendo, it’s been a general opposition to the entire concept, while others seem more worried about fan backlashes – as happened with the recent unveiling of Nvidia’s much derided DLSS 5 technology.
Surprisingly, though, the most consistently outspoken critic of the technology is Strauss Zelnick, the chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive, owner of Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games.
Rather than just shying away from AI he has taken every opportunity to deride it, insisting that, ‘There is no creativity that can exist, by definition, in any AI model because it is data-driven.’
Most recently, following the fallout from the DLSS 5 reveal, he laughed off the idea that tech such as Google’s Project Genie could be used to make games, insisting that, ‘There’s already plenty of technology out there that allow people to create video games.’
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Take-Two isn’t above the usual corporate machinations of the industry, having laid off more than 550 employees in 2024, despite making a profit of $2.29 billion (and that’s before the launch of GTA 6).
Perhaps Zelnick feels that the company’s comfortable position makes it easier for him to speak out against AI, since Take-Two certainly doesn’t have to worry about investors, given what a massive hit GTA 6 will be.
Whatever his reasons, it’s now reported that the publisher has laid off its entire AI team. Zelnick himself hasn’t commented on the situation but former Head of AI, Luke Dicken, wrote on LinkedIn that, ‘It’s truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with T2 – and that of my team – has come to an end.’
The majority of his post is dedicated to finding new jobs for his co-workers, but he adds: ‘We’ve been developing cutting edge technology to support game development now for seven years. These folks know how to match innovation and novel problem-solving approaches with strong product design chops to create systems that empower people throughout the development workflow.’
Dicken was previously senior director of applied AI at casual game publisher Zynga for a decade and has now set up a consulting service for the games industry called LuDic AI.
Whatever exactly he and his team were working on, apparently Take-Two doesn’t consider it useful enough to continue with. However, this is no guarantee that GTA 6 won’t feature AI generated content.
The game is (hopefully) almost finished at this point and so over the last seven years will have been receiving support from Dicken’s team. Given Zelnick’s attitude that’s unlikely to involve any content that will be obvious to players but one of the more common uses of generative AI is in programming.
Of course, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence yet, it’s just called that to make it sound better to customers and investors. But while the use of large language models (LLMs) in chatbots and search engines remains controversial, other branches of the technology, such as resolution upscalers, have been in use in gaming for years with no complaints.
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