Wednesday, November 19th 2025
CEO of GTA VI Publisher Wants AI NPCs for "More Natural" Conversations
In the latest of the AI takeover of the video games industry, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of the GTA franchise, made some remarks in a CNBC interview that seem to suggest Take-Two may also soon start embracing AI in games. Speaking on the possibilities of the future of AI in video games, Zelnick says that one of the applications Take-Two is currently exploring is using AI to improve efficiency in the development pipeline, going on to emphasize that those efficiencies are "taking away mundane tasks, so people can focus on more interesting and creative tasks," and not necessarily reducing employment. Expanding further, Zelnick suggests that AI could be used in the creative process, providing the example of streamlining voice acting by training an AI model on a voice actor's lines and using the AI to generate NPC dialogue instead of scripting every interaction. He explains that if characters were to be trained on scripts recorded by voice actors, they could interact more naturally.
The idea of training an AI on the voices of paid actors is not new in gaming. Recently, Embark Studios explained how it used a similar model to create more versatile, interesting drop and marker callouts in both Arc Raiders and The Finals. This approach has been criticized for potentially putting voice actors' jobs at risk. When asked about a potential future in which AI could be used to create a game by someone with no technical knowledge, Zelnick explained that, while AI may be able to visually approximate a video game, creating a game is more complicated, specifically referring to the creative and technical talent, marketing, and the bigger picture that would prevent a fully AI-generated game from being realistically attainable—at least in the foreseeable future. Zelnick's comments come shortly after EA signed an agreement with Perplexity AI to integrate AI into workflows throughout the game studio—despite these systems allegedly wreaking havoc on employee efficiency—and Krafton announced a pivot to being an AI-first company.
Source:
CNBC
The idea of training an AI on the voices of paid actors is not new in gaming. Recently, Embark Studios explained how it used a similar model to create more versatile, interesting drop and marker callouts in both Arc Raiders and The Finals. This approach has been criticized for potentially putting voice actors' jobs at risk. When asked about a potential future in which AI could be used to create a game by someone with no technical knowledge, Zelnick explained that, while AI may be able to visually approximate a video game, creating a game is more complicated, specifically referring to the creative and technical talent, marketing, and the bigger picture that would prevent a fully AI-generated game from being realistically attainable—at least in the foreseeable future. Zelnick's comments come shortly after EA signed an agreement with Perplexity AI to integrate AI into workflows throughout the game studio—despite these systems allegedly wreaking havoc on employee efficiency—and Krafton announced a pivot to being an AI-first company.
26 Comments on CEO of GTA VI Publisher Wants AI NPCs for "More Natural" Conversations
This takes story points, for everyone's awareness.
They are many sprints away from getting to the "creative tasks", by the sound of it. :)
Expect GTA6 by 2035.
Bruh, if it's actually useful, it'll be used and they won't need to pointlessly put "AI" in product names or endlessly talk about it, without any decent real world implementations.
1. Actual AI games that focus on AI as the core feature.
2. AI mod in a known game.
In case of 1. You will pretty much end up mostly talking to an NPC to solve issues, AI will be using a ~3 years old LLM that will hallucinate and in cases break character.
In case of 2. You will install AI mod and you will have to be on top of your modding skills, because this is complicated to customize and set up LLM and AI framework to work well, even more so than generic modding. On top of that. it will cost you extra money as you will use LLMs from AI providers. The result however, is far superior, and you get access to latest LLMs that do way better job. Plus, you are playing an actual game, not just talking.
In case of GTAVI, if NPC will use LLMs to generate text, then they will also need in-house TTS (to generate voice on the go). If this feature will use a decent LLM and be any sophisticated, then it will surely have a subscription. If not, then it will be same mediocre quality LLM and TTS as in those AI games, and I believe they are better of using scripted dialogue lines.
As for pricing: For a few hours of dialogue in game, and that's without TTS cost, a decent LLM like Qwen, Deepseek, Kimi, GLM, will burn $1-2, ChatGPT models about twice as much (they aren't really better for roleplay tho), and something like Claude Sonnet will be 4-5x as much (probably the best, but expensive AF). Also, if Rockstar decides to make TTS integral part of the game and use the customer's GPU to generate voice lines, you can expect massive FPS dips during TTS process. Probably that will be also done online, but that will result in mroe delays.
Which brings me to another massive issue, the delays. At best, you can expect a response within 2-4 sec, and I think that would come off weird to players, and they would challenge it.
NOT a way to cut costs/time.
He's implying the first, but we all know it's going to be the second.
It's not sustainable. It's all just greed and grift.
One can also look no further at Cod Bo7, which is one of the heaviest AI written games we've seen yet. It has been an abject failure and it is blatantly obvious where the AI slop is.
AI is not a replacement for actual human creativity, its just a facsimile of it. I hope Take Two does it, and utterly bombs their next game.There's simply no way to vette an AI for quality writing output without manually reviewing everything it does. That's why this idea is totally DOA.
Zelda II have 2 lines of speechs by NPC, it was more than enough. 😁
Go Rockstar
www.techpowerup.com/342495/messy-rockstar-firings-ahead-of-gta-6-accusations-from-gross-misconduct-to-union-busting-and-unjust-layoffsThat's where most fat and excess is in these comporations.
And anyway these modern MBA scammers know only one way and AI would do that for lot cheaper.
(And yes, sometimes they do say interesting things.)
Why mostly the need to talk to NPCs is gone is due to "improvements" in game design, for example now we have quest markers on the map, quick travel, etc...
In Morrowind as an example you need to talk to NPC to get quests and more importantly to know where to go and what to look for.
It was well implemented.
What would also be pretty cool is if they did real time training based on your play style. You could have crazy interactions like if you shoot dogs a lot, an NPC could potentially make a comment about that, postive or negative based on that NPCs unique character inputs. Or if you never use shotguns or suck at using them but you are in a mission where you are using a shotgun, your NPC ally could be like "wtf are you using a shotgun man! You suck with it. Switch it out. Don't let me die. " Etc.
There are a lot of awesome possibilities. People view AI has cheap, easy, low quality. But this doesn't have to be the case. It would still take a decently sized team to train really good models and implement them well across the thousands of NPCs in a game like GTA.
I work on an AI training model to detect objects within a picture. If I train the model with just 12 images, I am going to get like 90% false positives and miss 40% of the positive stuff. If I train a model with 1000 images, then my false positives go down to <1% and my misses go down to <1%. But it is VERY time consuming and laborus to train a model with 1000 images.