During a talk at the Paley Media Center in the San Francisco Bay Area on changing consumer trends in media, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick discussed the current state of AI technology in game development and how it will impact gaming in the future.
Along with expanding his views on the nascent technology, its limitations compared to human creativity and how he believes it will lead to increased job opportunities, a theory that contradicts job loss projections made by other managers. He said this in response to a question from fellow panelist Bob Pittman, CEO of iHeartMedia, about the future of employment in a world powered by generative artificial intelligence. “This will not reduce employment, but will increase employment,” he said. “Technology always increases productivity, which in turn increases GDP, which in turn increases employment. And you know, in 1865, 65% of the US labor force was employed in agriculture.”
“Today we produce food for America and the rest of the world, and 2% of the workforce is employed in agriculture. And I challenge you to find someone who recently told you, “It’s so terrible that I can’t get a job as a farmer,” and employment is skyrocketing. AI is a great thing. This is a great thing for every industry. Will he create a genius? No. Will he create hits? No. This is a bunch of data with a bunch of computers with a language model attached.”
This followed other comments in which he described generative AI as a “backward” technology unable to excel in the “forward-thinking” creative field.
“You have to look at it as a set of tools. Our business has been connected to digital tools since its inception,” said the CEO of the company, which will soon release Grand Craft Auto VI. “I think we can probably improve efficiency and we're already trying to do that. We're looking at 200 different possibilities at any given time, but what AI is not going to do, because remember, AI is the combination of large data sets with a bunch of computers within a natural LLM, a large language model. And by definition, the data set is backward oriented and the creativity forward oriented. Foresight, that’s what a predictive model is.”
“We have a combination of metadata and parlor trick.”
The growing influence and potential of artificial intelligence technologies was a theme growing interest and concern for developers in the video game industry. As layoffs become a regular occurrence in the industry in recent years, some developers are looking to change the situation by introducing more artificial intelligence technologies into the workflow to improve productivity.
The Take-Two CEO explained that AI is a tool for human workers and is essentially a “parlor trick” that uses predictive data.
“Cause [AI] It's so unusual now because we have a combination of metadata with a parlor trick; We’ll all get used to it,” he said. “We're really getting used to it in the same way that if it was 25 years ago and I handed you today's version of Google, you'd be shocked at what it can do for you. And now it’s like: “Yes, I looked again” – this is all very standard, and [AI] will be the standard, this is the future of technology.”
Currently, many industries in technology, media and other fields are resilient. waves of layoffs (some in Zelnik's own company), which destroyed careers and projects. However, Strauss remained optimistic that the technology would eventually prove useful and ultimately lead to further expansion of employment.
