The Take-Two AI Story That Nobody Got Right | 08/04/26
Plus our update for premium subscribers on new and upcoming content!
When a story breaks and every games outlet misreports on it.
Tommy has a right good rant about poor AI reporting, again.
An update on the conference, Goal State, and upcoming case studies.
Plus a brand new project coming your way later this year.
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Hello one and all and welcome to this week’s edition of AI and Games. Hope you had a (un)healthy amount of easter eggs for those of you who celebrate the chocolate bunny gods. This week we have big behind-the-scenes update for premium subscribers. But before that, I have a bone to pick with a news headline.
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The One News Story That Annoyed Me This Week
Sadly news come down last week that a central AI team at Take-Two Interactive was being let go. An undisclosed number of individuals headed by now former head of AI Luke Dicken are out of a job as he reported on LinkedIn. Dicken had been in a leadership position on the subject for seven years, first at Zynga and then Take-Two.
This is a sad outcome for sure, and I wish the team the very best in finding new positions. Now full disclosure I’ve known Dicken for close to 20 years (good grief, has it been that long?) and have met staff that reported to him in recent years at GDC. I am not pointing this out to make more of a story of how this group of people lost their job versus everybody else, or to go to bat for these people disproportionately.
Rather, I raise it because I’m annoyed at how badly this story has been reported on.
Everyone from Kotaku, to Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, Engadget, TweakTown, PCGamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and TheGamer all reported on this story, and all built a narrative around it that doesn’t reflect reality.
It doesn’t help that most of this stems from that many outlets simply reported off the back of the Kotaku article (see Eurogamer, GI.biz and Engadget) or PCGamers’ (I mean the RPS and TheGamer articles are just copies of it), but also that it is then presented with zero context. Given this is not a particularly big event on its own, every publication then pivots to making unrelated points on AI in the games industry, to sound like it’s part of a bigger developing narrative. More often than not falling back onto former comments on AI by Take Two. Such as President Karl Slatoff’s recent musings on Google’s Genie 3 to CEO Strauss Zelnick’s opinions on Generative AI that range from intrigued to ambivalent.
All of this helps add substance to an argument in these stories that shows the turning of a tide against an aggressive pursuit of Generative AI at Take Two, or the industry as a whole. That two months ago Zelnick suddenly changed his mind about AI and so a team that had been sprung up to do Generative AI ‘stuff’ is now fired. When in truth the reality is probably much more benign: budgets being cut as the need for a central AI team is no longer needed.
Now I’m not saying that’s the story. I just suspect it’s far less sensational than has been reported. I don’t have any inside baseball as to what happened here. I did reach out to Luke to express my sympathies but I didn’t do so in pursuit of an inside scoop for the newsletter (also I had no plan to write this story). For me that’s both unprofessional and frankly icky. I have no interest in exploiting my personal and professional network in pursuit of clicks. Besides I doubt Luke can even comment on at this time. That said, I got annoyed at this for two reasons:
Any effort to do a surface-level analysis of the situation can tell the headlines don’t match up.
This feeds into uninformed anti-AI sentiment that causes people who actually work in the AI corner of games more harm than good.
First up, this team isn’t some Generative AI start-up, they were a central AI team previously at Zynga and then folded into Take-Two when they were acquired. The bulk of their work is not Generative AI based. They’re a team that’s been focussed on procedural content generation tooling and machine learning. Supporting deployment of ML in broader DevOps in aspects of automation and tooling for developers. What they’ve been doing in Generative AI is relatively minimal and also more recent, given they’ve been a team that’s been focussed on supporting game projects.
All of this is pointed out in Dicken’s LinkedIn post, but most news outlets conveniently forgot to mention it, given it contradicts their narratives.
Now the reason this annoys me is that it feeds back into a lack of nuanced conversation about what’s happening on AI in the sector. Misreporting like this, or at least tying it into narratives that are unsubstantiated is an evergreen issue of the games industry. It’s how you get narratives ranging from the benign to the damaging to manifest.
On one hand it’s all fun and games that people still seem to think that Nintendo are going to drop a fully-fledged 3D Mario game this year - despite zero evidence to support the theory other than a new movie is out - to targeted hate campaigns that masquerade as advocates of the industry under dog-whistle politics around issues of ‘ethics in game journalism’ and ‘DEI in games’. I can’t help but fear being an ‘AI programmer’ at a games studio is going to be the next angle.
I mean just look at the comments section of most of those news stories, or even this random Reddit thread, where but a handful of people are actually speaking sense. Everyone is feeding off of the anti-Generative AI sentiment. And while I understand it, and to an extent am all for it, this team is being roasted for no other reason than they work in a sector that has been demonised by the very nonsense they didn’t embrace.
Heck, the one bit of inside baseball I’d suggest is if you’ve ever followed Luke on social media, you’d know full well how dismissive he is of much of the Generative AI hype. The man does not mince his words…
I’m sorry I have a lot of respect for the publications involved and many of the writers, but it would help if you actually reported on the story as it stands rather than misreport on these stories to make them more than they are - a point I raised just recently in the final part of the Game AI Existential Crisis essay. I’ve complained about this before be it with the Microsoft Muse project, with Google Genie, the Google Cloud AI survey, and many more besides. The willingness to be anti-AI on everything is frankly a little too easy, and efforts should be make to better understand where all of these things in the sector.
My apologies to Luke and his team for making this the focus of the issue. I wish the team all the best and hope you find new positions soon. Be sure to check out Dicken’s LinkedIn for info on the folks who lost their roles.
Behind-the-Scenes Updates
Okay here we go. There’s a lot of stuff happening for us right now in the background, be it the 2026 conference, new case studies, Goal State, newsletter issues and more. So let’s dig into where we are with all of these and what to expect as a regular reader and fan of our work. It’s important to me that our audience can get a bit of an insight into what we’re doing, plus how we’re investing the funds we raise from our premium subscriptions. For this edition we’ll cover:
The case studies we’ll be presenting over the next 2-3 months.
What we have planned for newsletter topics.
A new AI and Games project coming your way in the next few months.
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