Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick has apparently sided with the machines in the ongoing AI debate currently consuming the entertainment industry. He thinks the innovative new technology could improve the next Grand Theft Auto by adding more variety to dialogue trees to entice lapsed players back potentially, but stopped short of confirming whether or not such methods had been implemented in the next GTA.
In an interview with Inverse, at the Paley International Council Summit, when asked about the benefits of AI in future games, Zelnick said: "Everyone’s working on that. You’re a playable character; you’re interacting with the non-playable character. That interaction is currently scripted. And the non-playable characters are generally not very interesting. You could imagine all the NPCs becoming really interesting and fun.”
Whether aspects of the eagerly anticipated successor to the best-selling game of all time were made using generative AI remains to be seen. Zelnick remained tight-lipped on the topic, saying only: "I can confirm that Rockstar is working on the next iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise. More than that comes from Rockstar.".
Zelnick's takes are legendary, and we expect this one to age just about as well. It can live long in our collective consciousness alongside classics like "they aren't all that meaningful" in relation to mid-gen updates like PS5 Pro or that charging $50 was "commercially accurate" for the much-maligned PS4 port of Red Dead Redemption.