In all the years I've listened to video game industry executives at earnings reports, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick struck me as one of the most cautious bosses in the business. Whenever he was asked about the rise of Xbox Game Pass, he pointed out that subscriptions are still a small part of the business and did not declare NFT to be the future of commerce five minutes after learning about it. This is a low bar, but it is faintly refreshing to hear a tech executive respond to buzzwords with anything other than the unconditional enthusiasm of a golden retriever. During Monday's investor conference call, when Zelnick was asked what he thought about the advances in AI technology.

"You know I'm the first person to be skeptical of other people's hype. And I would like to note that AI stands for "artificial intelligence" and there is no such thing as artificial intelligence."

The CEO believes that some hopes and fears inspired by AI are overstated, reasoning, for example, that portable calculators did not stop children from learning math, so writing bots like ChatGPT does not mean the end of essays. He also believes that Take-Two studios, including Rockstar, Firaxis, Cloud Chamber (the new BioShock developer), and Hangar 13, are in no danger of being replaced by bots that spit out games.

"And [AI] won't allow someone to say, 'Please develop a better Grand Theft Auto competitor than Grand Theft Auto.

"And Zelnick said, 'I don't think we're going to allow that.'

Nevertheless, Zelnick believes that AI research is a big deal and is interested in using it to make games. Rather than making development cheaper overall, he said, AI tools "just raise the bar" in the industry. [We are ushering in a very exciting era of new tools,] Zelnick said on the conference call. You will want to be more creative."

Even at this research stage, the controversial AI image generator is being used to generate inspiration for game art and even to generate assets directly. However, Zelnick certainly mentions some less sensational applications of machine learning algorithms. As an example, Ubisoft already uses a machine learning-based animation tool called Anything World for prototyping.

Another interesting application of machine learning is training AI opponents, such as Google's AI StarCraft player. While there tends to be a catch-22 with every interesting advance in the field of machine learning, for better or worse, even the wise Zelnick believes that we are on the edge of a new era. Not one that replaces the large development teams of this era, but one that, as he puts it, "will allow development teams to do more.