‘Grand Theft Auto’ Publisher Says AI Won’t Help It Make Games Faster

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive, told CNBC he doesn’t think AI is going to revolutionize how they make video games. “I would love to say that it’s going to make things cheaper, quicker, better, or easier to make hits. I don’t think that’s the case,” Zelnick said.

Zelnick appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box to talk about his company’s quarterly earnings and the impact of AI. Take-Two is a gaming giant that publishes Grand Theft Auto. GTA V was one of the most successful entertainment products of all time and Zelnick is looking to GTA VI, which releases next year, to replicate that success. It probably will, based on inertia alone.

During the interview the hosts asked him how he thought AI might change his business. In a world where tech CEOs constantly crow about how AI will herald an age of untold advancements in efficiency, Zelnick’s answer was shockingly measured.

“The interactive entertainment business has been in AI forever. Let me just remind you that AI stands for artificial intelligence. Which is an oxymoron. There is no such thing. It’s just a description of a digital toolset and that digital toolset will affect every part of our lives in the way that, when we got smartphones, it affected every part of our lives,” Zelnick said.

Pressed on the issue, Zelnick pushed back on the idea that AI would help anyone make a hit. “All of our tools do help us become more efficient…that said, it’s going to become commoditized. Everyone is going to have access to the same tools. That is the history of toolsets. What it means, though, is our creative people will be able to do fewer mundane tasks and turn their attention to the really creative tasks,” he said. “The machines can’t make the creative decisions for you.”

It’s a refreshing thing to hear from a game company CEO. NVIDIA, which sells the GPUs that power a lot of AI products, has promised that advanced LLMs and other AI systems can replace writers. At CES in January, the company demoed an AI bartender in a cyberpunk setting and declared it the future of video games. Reviews of the experience, to be generous, were mixed.

Ubisoft is another company going all in on AI. The beleaguered game publisher has a habit of chasing tech trends and making things consumers don’t want. It launched a full blown NFT game a few weeks ago to no fanfare whatsoever. One of its AI pitches is “Ghostwriter AI” which, it says, will write NPC barks—the little bits of noise NPCs make as you pass them in the game world—and free writers to focus on more intense and creative tasks.

Take-Two has had at least one bad high-profile experience with AI. The release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition in 2021 was a disaster. The developers used AI upscaling to bring old games to new TVs and the results were awful. The series is known for its over-the-top and crass humor and puns. Often, the upscale-er butchered street signs, billboards, and shop window advertisements and turned them into nonsense. Objects in the world that were intentionally boxy, such as a giant six-sided nut above a donut shot, were smoothed to the point they lost their definition. Take-Two spent months working on the game after its release to fix the problems AI upscaling introduced.