Gaming Companies See AI As A Toy, Not A Tool

One of the biggest problems I have with AI in gaming is the kooky way executives talk about it. It's very clear that it's viewed less as a tool and more as a toy - this may just be a public-facing attitude, but given that this extends to investor calls and internal emails as much as it does interviews and PR statements, it’s probably the truth. Tools have a specific purpose. They may be fun to use - an artist certainly enjoys using a pencil - but ultimately they are designed with an express function, and they enable the user to carry out a certain task faster or better. Toys are just for amusement. No purpose, no end product, just an empty thrill. The language around AI is that it's a neat new thing that could do anything, but that only makes it clearer than those advocating for it don't have any idea of what that 'anything' may entail.

I've written in more depth about the dangers of unregulated AI in gaming here, while we also discussed the issue with gaming actors ﷺlike Yuri Lowenthal and Roger Clark a few months back. Th✅is week however (the same week GTA 6 was officially announced to huge fanfare), Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told the Paley International Council Summit (from , via ) that AI dialogue could be "really interesting and fun", a sentence that means nothing and speaks volumes. There are four words in that soundbite, and I dislike three of them.

I edit about as much as I write at TheGamer, and it's rare that I let a 'really' slip by. It's a dull filler word used for boring emphasis. 'Fun' is another that often gets cut, it is vague in the extreme and tells us nothing. 'Interesting' is a little better if applied to something ('the way X does Y is interesting because Z'), but here it means nothing. And's cool. And can stay.

This is not just to nitpick his choice of language. I read through the whole thing (Inverse's article linked above has you covered), and I promise it doesn't get any better. The only qualifier for how interesting AI dialogue is was a counterpoint that the current method of writing dialogue is "generally not very interesting". This puts Zelnick at a direct opposite to the people his company sells things to. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto pioneered the idea of a living, breathing open world with GTA 3 and has been building on that foundation ever since. For many, myself included, the pinnacle of this style of design is another Rockstar game, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption 2.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has some issues with on-rails missions, but from a pure worldbuilding perspective, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it has yet to be topped.

I don't believe anybody played Red Dead Redemption 2 and wished that instead of the game's incredible curated narratives with emotional voice acting, it was instead a choose your own adventure machine where randomly generated barks replaced the written side quests and were haphazardly stitched together into a generic story. AI is the cool new toy, but it's not a tool because all it does is what humans can do already. Its defenders will say that it can do these things much faster and cheaper, and that this is worth the trade off in quality. However, this is another way in which Zelnick marks himself as an outsider.

He believes that AI "may be better, but it almost certainly will not be faster and cheaper". This makes him a major outlier - , but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:at the cost of quality (obviously those who praise AI don't say that second part quite so loudly). It makes Zelnick's words, if I may break my own rules, really interesting. The fact he speaks about AI in vague terms, and sees one of his company's games' biggest strength as a weakness, suggests a distinct lack of direction. But he also seems to believe AI is even better than what a human can create, but will take far longer and incur a much greater cost. Being against what everyone else says oddly suggests some expertise of his own - to go counter to the narrative, rather than parroting the general line of thought, would hint at critical thinking on the matter.

It's hard to imagine these characters would have been better with AI-generated dialogue

As for where that leaves Take-Two's games, it's difficult to say. Rockstar has enough clout to do things its own way, and Zelnick has from any potential video game actor's strike, meaning there's no generative AI in the game. But Take-Two owns a lot of companies, not least mobile giant Zynga, and we're yet to see generative AI make any serious footsteps into gaming. But that step is coming, and it will likely be the companies that see it as a toy, who misuse it for the sake of using it, who will make the first move.

In a way, I want it over with. The Finals uses AI commentators and has♒ received mass criticism, as the cold light of day eradicates the vague optimism that AI might be really interesting and fun. Once we move out of the soundbites and into action, we'll see how effective AI can be. Until somebody gives me a concrete reason to change my mind, I still don't see a use for it.