The CEO of Take-Two Ieractive, Strauss Zelnick, expressed his views on the impact of artificial ielligence on game developme during the Paley Iernational Council Summit and said that artificial ielligence is “a combination of metadata and a magic trick.” The technology is “a very good thing” for businesses, he says, but it’s not creative and never will be.
Zelnik has had a clear and consiste opinion about artificial ielligence for years. While some game industry executives tout AI as an impending revolution in revenue generation (and creativity, of course), Zelnik has always taken a more cautious view. He said in May 2023: “Ingenuity is the domain of humans and I believe it will remain so.”
At a rece conference in California, Zelnick explained that the use of artificial ielligence “will probably increase the productivity of game studios,” but it will never create successful games because it is fundameally lacking in creativity. “Artificial ielligence is really a combination of big data sets and a lot of processing in the form of a big language model,” he said. Then, referring to his previous poi of view, he coinued: “What is the nature of the dataset? A look back. What is the essence of creativity? “Looking io the future, and if AI is looking io the future, it’s actually a predictive model.”
Zelnick added that predictive models perform well when they have enough data, but struggle when there is not enough data. He said the reason artificial ielligence looks “faastic” today is because it’s a combination of “metadata and magic”. But eveually this technology will gradually become normal and “we will get used to it too”, like what happened with Google.
Zelnik also predicted, as in the past, that the arrival of artificial ielligence will increase jobs instead of reducing them. He gave a historical example: “In 1865, about 65% of the American workforce was engaged in agriculture. “Today, only 2 perce of the population is in agriculture, but we produce all of America‘s food and much of the world’s food, and I guaraee you that you won’t find anyone who says it’s too bad I can’t be a farmer anymore.”
Despite his cautious view, Zelnik is not against AI; He simply understands the limitations of the gaming industry more than most, or at least is willing to be honest about them. “Artificial ielligence is a wonderful thing and it’s great for all industries,” he said. But can it recreate or create genius? no Can it create a successful phenomenon? no “In the end, it’s just a collection of data with lots of processing power and a language model attached to it.”
Source: PCGamer
