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It’s fair to say that the use of generative AI in game development is not widely liked: Just witness the backlash when its presence is even suspected. On the other hand, it’s not going away, and a significant portion of game developers are already using it in some capacity. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick recently shared some interesting thoughts on the matter: In an interview with GamesIndustry, he said it’s not something to worry about because AI doesn’t really exist at all.
“Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron, there’s no such thing,” Zelnick said. “Machine learning, machines don’t learn. Those are convenient ways to explain to human beings what looks like magic. The bottom line is that these are digital tools and we’ve used digital tools forever. I have no doubt that what is considered AI today will help make our business more efficient and help us do better work, but it won’t reduce employment.
“To the contrary, the history of digital technology is that technology increases employment, increases productivity, increases GDP and I think that’s what’s going to happen with AI. I think the videogame business will probably be on the leading, if not bleeding, edge of using AI.”
It’s arguable that generative AI does in fact reduce employment. The maker of the Champions of Otherworldly Magic digital trading card game, for instance, said in 2024 that it paid $90,000 to a single “AI artist” for 10 hours of work because “in that time, he still makes HUNDREDS of AMAZING bits of artwork—ASTRONOMICALLY FASTER than ANY team of traditional artists.” But you could also argue, as Zelnick does, that generative AI is just another tool, and part of the ongoing evolution of game development, not all that different from, say, GameMaker Studio 2.
I think that’s a bit of an optimistic outlook—the whole point of automation is to remove the expense of human labor from the bottom line, after all. But if nothing else, Zelnick has been consistent on this point. He said virtually the same thing—”there is no such thing as artificial intelligence“—during a Take-Two investors call in February 2023, for instance, and in May of that year he said “artificial intelligence is an oxymoron,” and that while such tools enable more efficient work, “Genius is the domain of human beings and I believe will stay that way.”
Perhaps tiring of the topic, he was somewhat blunter while speaking at a TD Cowen conference in 2024. “I’m in a Whatsapp chat with a bunch of Silicon Valley CEOs, and the conventional wisdom out there is like, ‘AI is gonna make us all unemployed’,” he said at the time. “It is just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The history of productivity tools is that it increases employment. It increases value, it increases yield, it enhances growth. All of these things will happen.”
One interesting point Zelnick made in the GamesIndustry interview is the risk of copyright infringement that using LLMs poses. That’s kind of a big thing in the world of AI development: OpenAI, for instance, recently complained that competitor DeepSeek has been using its data, which is incredibly ironic because OpenAI trains on data scarfed up from other sources, often without permission—in January 2024, in fact, OpenAI said it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”
That’s a mess Zelnick seems eager to avoid. “In terms of [AI] guardrails, if you mean not infringing on other people’s intellectual property by poaching their LLMs, yeah, we’re not going to do that,” he said. “Moreover, if we did, we couldn’t protect that, we wouldn’t be able to protect our own IP. So of course, we’re mindful of what technology we use to make sure that it respects others’ intellectual property and allows us to protect our own.”
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Kurt Indovina
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