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Artificial intelligence and its use in game development has been a hot topic in the industry, with many creatives anxious about its impact on job security, players worried about how it could strip the humanity out of games, and some executives excited by its potential to make stuff faster and cheaper.
Take-Two, the parent company of GTA 6‘s Rockstar Games and publisher 2K, will likely pursue the technology regardless. During an interview at TD Cowen’s 52nd Annual Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference earler this week, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick claimed that generative AI could allow the company’s developers to “do a bunch of stuff more efficiently… so we’ll turn our attention to other things, and those other things will probably still be costly and time-consuming.”
Comments around efficiency might not inspire much hope in the developers that actually create Take-Two’s games since similar jargon is frequently used by executives when announcing layoffs, emphasizing productivity and lean workplaces. Take-Two itself announced nearly 600 layoffs after claiming it had “no current plans” to do so, before also shutting down the teams behind Olli Olli World and Kerbal Space Program 2 soon after.
Despite those concerns, Zelnick continues to state that AI won’t harm employment. “I also don’t think for a minute that generative AI is going to reduce employment, that’s crazy,” he adds. “It’s actually crazy. It’s not going to make people irrelevant. It’s going to change the nature of certain forms of employment, and that’s a good thing.” How the tech will “change the nature” of the medium was left a mystery, particularly when most forms of generative AI scrap pre-existing data to spit out whatever sound, image, or writing the user wants.
Regardless, numerous reports already detail the ways in which AI can, and already has, impacted jobs. Only time will tell, but creators across the industry don’t have high hopes for the tech, from Hideo Kojima and Cyberpunk 2077’s lead quest designer to a Red Dead Redemption 2 actor.
Elsewhere, the CEO said GTA 6 could be “unmatched in the industry.”