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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.
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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.”
Then there’s the actual purported productivity gains where, even in areas like coding, where AI seems to’ve dug its heels in the most, Dicken says it’s debatable: “I often see people throwing around, like, oh, my engineers are 100x engineers because of Claude Code … [but] individuals are not necessarily reliable narrators of what the impact is, so you need to be quantifying objectively, and very few people want to run those case studies.”
On the flipside, “If you’re a true believer, it’s so obvious that it’s having this massive impact, why would you run a case study? Why would you spend the time?”
It’s that true believer-ism that Dicken seems the most vocally opposed to, though—batting aside the promises of generative AI as some miracle tool, because as he sees it, in a gold rush, people don’t sell you the tools if they could sell you gold.
“If any of this shit actually did what people are billing it as, they would not be talking about it,” Dicken says. “These would be protected like the crown jewels and Fort Knox combined … It’s like the guy sat here telling you that there’s a gold rush going and you need to get in on the gold rush, buy my pickaxe. The guy should be selling you the gold if he’s actually got the gold.”
That’s not to say companies aren’t able to screw you over if they have sold you the tools. For many, the price of tokens has risen substantially, a sort of looming ‘oh, crap, we’re in a bubble’ situation that, among other things, caused the CEO of Palantir to have a bit of a meltdown on television.
Which isn’t great if you’re a company, because at least with employees, you decide how much you pay them—you don’t get that luxury if you’re leaning half of your workload on AI: “Where you bake it into a pipeline, and that pipeline has now rigidity, and you are now vendor-locked to something that you know is going to get its price jacked up.”
The Side Quest compares it, aptly, to the Unity debacle wherein the ubiquitous engine suddenly jacked up its prices, leading to a year of outrage and what I can only describe as reputational implosion. “We’re sleepwalking into that same situation,” Dicken agrees.
And yet, the goldrush mentality persists—even as corporations repeatedly pants themselves: “These are organizations that are supposed to be serious organizations that you would imagine would have guardrails against this stuff … The FOMO and the newness and the velocity and all of these things are contributing to an environment where you can’t get the guardrails down fast enough to actually prevent some of the crazy.”
As for where he sees it all landing, Dicken’s experience in working with AI since the technology’s inception
“I think that there will be an amount of long-term changes. But in the way that the industry had to figure out how to adopt 3D tools like Maya, it’s not going to be the seismic shift. That’s my sense. Could be wrong … I think that they are not a trillion dollar business that’s going to revolutionise everything. But as a piece of technology, I want to figure out what these things could do for games.”
Still, even if I personally eye-roll at the prospect of having AI in videogames—outside of hypothetically neat toys—Dicken is at least cognisant of the fact you need to actually use the correct tool for the job, not just cram AI-generated slop into existing genres or types of games and expect it to work.
“There is a fundamental thesis to a game, and what you put into that game needs to align with that thesis.” Examples where this goes wrong, Dicken adds, “is just shoving stuff in to tick the finance earnings call investor box, rather than trying to build the best damn thing you can build that’s going to earn the most money, because it’s building something that people want.”
