The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.
And he said it without being anti-AI.
Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.
Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.
The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.
And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.
Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.
The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.
What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.
Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.
Those are different jobs.
I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took.
Thank you for getting us to this point.
Otro contrato firmado en secreto que nos comoromete por décadas.
El @PJudicialUY ¿no defiende la constitución del atropello que hacen los distintos poderes ejecutivos?
Parémoslo nosotros
✍🏼 Firmá por la Reforma Uruguaya Soberano, fijate cómo hacer en nuestro perfil
For the ninth(!) year in a row, I will be releasing 25 programming puzzles over the first 25 days of December over on https://t.co/yUcqHAUbop! It's completely free thanks to AoC++ supporters and thanks to sponsors. If you want to check it out early, all past puzzles are still up!
On Wed, 16 Aug 2023 (next week) Debian will celebrate its 30th birthday. Parties will take place in Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Germany (CCCcamp), Portugal and Turkey. You're invited to join us! https://t.co/nU90oB7P9f
The diagnostics working group is looking for your help adding support for internationalization of error messages to the Rust compiler. If you're interested in contributing, check out the blog post for more details! https://t.co/TcqLddvlz9