Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick believes that if game characters are trained with artificial intelligence on top of human-written scripts, they can hold much more natural conversations with players than today’s pre-scripted dialogue systems allow.

Zelnick recently appeared on CNBC’s morning business show Squawk Box, where he argued that, in the coming years, game characters will likely be trained with AI based on scripts written by human writers. This would enable them to talk to players in a more organic way instead of being confined to a finite set of lines authored once during development. He even floated the idea that such technology could be one of the key innovations Rockstar Games is cooking up for Grand Theft Auto VI. Only two days ago, a new rumor about the game suggested wildly ambitious features that could remain unmatched for decades.

Whether or not anything like this actually makes it into GTA VI, the underlying technology already exists. Nvidia ACE and Inworld AI are just two examples of tools that can drive characters to respond to natural dialogue, depending on what they are supposed to pay attention to. Zelnick also stressed that Take-Two is using these systems primarily to boost efficiency. The goal, he said, is not to cut staff, but to free people up so they can spend more time on genuinely creative work.

“Historically, we had to script every action a character engaged in. Because it’s interactive, just think about how much scripting that requires. We’re always going to need great writers, and there will always be plenty of scripting, but characters should be able to be trained on the scripting created by great writers and interact in a more natural way. I do see that happening. The baseline is creating more efficiency in development and marketing, and every enterprise is trying to do that. We’re trying to do that, and we’re seeing good early results in creating efficiencies. By the way, ‘efficiency’ is not code for reducing employment; it’s code for eliminating mundane tasks so people can focus on more interesting and creative ones”, Zelnick said.

His comments come at a moment when the use of AI in game development is already highly contentious. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been criticized for low-quality AI-generated assets, while Arc Raiders drew fire for using generative AI to create NPC voices. Speaking to GamesIndustry about the broader trend, the developers of the hugely successful episodic adventure game Dispatch said we should not be surprised, because this is exactly the path many expected the industry to take once it embraced AI. From their point of view, AI currently looks more like a production tool than a genuinely creative one, and perhaps it only starts to feel “creative” when we are not creative enough ourselves.

Source: WCCFTech, CNBC, GamesIndustry