// PC GAMER — GAMING
Take-Two's former AI guy is, in a twist, skeptical about AI now: 'The guy should be selling you the gold if he's actually got the gold'
"If any of this sh*t actually did what people are billing it as, they would not be talking about it."
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Take-Two Interactive, the publisher who oversees studios like Rockstar and Gearbox, had an AI guy. 'Had' being the operative word, seeing as he, and a decent chunk of its then-AI team, were laid off around a year after he took on the role. Dicken was previously a data scientist at Zynga, before becoming its director of applied AI in 2019, when a lot of generative AI and LLM technology was still in its infancy.
As someone who was the head of AI for one of the biggest videogame publishers on the planet, capable of making such tectonic swings that other developers are scampering to get out of its videogame's launch date, you'd think that Dicken would be one of the true believer types. It's my pleasure to, via an in-depth interview from The Side Quest, reveal that Dicken is actually overall pretty skeptical.
It's not as if he's given up on the technology entirely—but he certainly speaks with the same echo as many industry skeptics, including (perhaps tellingly) Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick himself.
First up, there's the public perception, which—when discussing Clair Obscur's lost Indie award wins after its own AI placeholder debacle—says that creatives in the industry "see the use of generative AI as an abdication of intentionality, as an abdication of authorial intent. And consequently they assume, in a lot of cases rightly (I'll caveat the hell out of what I'm saying here) but in a lot of cases rightly, that's a pervasive abdication of authorial intent."
As for the masses, "Western audiences, so North America, Europe, seem to be more strongly anti-generative. And anecdotally, what I've heard is that Asian audiences are more accepting and more tolerant of this stuff … The internet's not representative of the mass audience. So to what extent is the anti-GenAI sentiment mainstream versus vocal minority? I don't have an answer to that."
What has Dicken more skeptical from a place of authority, however, is the actual graft of how videogames are made. For example, a lot of videogames with AI-generated dialogue haven't taken off the ground because, well, more isn't always more:
"Games are curated experiences. When you look at a dialogue tree and there's three options, yeah, you could make that 50, 100, we could have made it 100 options without generative AI... you've got 100 options, but only two of them get you to where you actually are trying to go. Adding more options is not the answer."
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