GRAND THEFT AUTO's Publisher on AI Hype

PLUS: Restoring "The Blair Witch Project"

Author

Steve
November 12, 2024

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Grand Theft Auto’s Publisher on AI Hype

I’m a big video game guy! I know, this is incredibly surprising information, about as unexpected as finding out Cookie Monster has a sweet tooth. I’ve played games as a child instead of going outside, as a college student instead of studying for class, and as a grown man instead of writing this newsletter before the absolute last minute (Do I still have a game playing in the background while I write this? None of your business!).

I don’t cover the video game industry much on here because its ebbs and flows are somewhat different than that of entertainment, aside from the perennial search for video game crossover viewership.

All that said, via Gizmodo, I was pretty interested in this AI take from Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick:

The interactive entertainment business has been in AI forever. Let me just remind you that AI stands for artificial intelligence. Which is an oxymoron. There is no such thing. It’s just a description of a digital toolset and that digital toolset will affect every part of our lives in the way that, when we got smartphones, it affected every part of our lives…

All of our tools do help us become more efficient… that said, it’s going to become commoditized. Everyone is going to have access to the same tools. That is the history of toolsets. What it means, though, is our creative people will be able to do fewer mundane tasks and turn their attention to the really creative tasks. The machines can’t make the creative decisions for you.

In case you’re not a video game enthusiast/dead-eyed night zombie like myself, Take-Two is the publisher of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto series. You know, where in comfort of your home you can take a cool drive to the beach with your tunes blasting, or maybe beat a prostitute to death while shooting at cops.

I think within video games is where you’ll see the actual practical application of AI outside of the vague stock-boosting deals made by the studios, or the bizarre use case scenarios favored by the streamers.

As an example of the latter, check out this breathless IndieWire article about Amazon Prime’s new AI tool in X-ray:

X-Ray Recaps is powered through generative AI models trained on various video segments of shows, subtitles, and other dialogue, and it manages to generate a brief, detailed description of the key moments and even specific places, times, conversations, and character names, present in an episode or a season of TV to help you catch up. It’s like having ChatGPT on your remote, but you can only prompt it to tell you what happened last week on “The Wheel of Time.”

Hmm, hope this ends up working better than Apple Intelligence!

Restoring The Blair Witch Project

This year is the 25th anniversary of The Blair Witch Project, a fact more disturbing than the movie itself! With found footage film finally reaching car-rental age, there’s been lots of fascinating articles written about it lately. One particularly important one that should be read before all others is how badly its main three actors were screwed out of profit participation. They were essentially co-writers and co-directors and they got zilch!

Another bit of crazy trivia: the film hasn’t existed in its intended form on home video at any point since its release, according to co-producer Mike Monello:

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

The latest tech in facial animation. (link)

The more expensive your TV, the less likely it is you watch AVOD services. (link)

How Swan Lake came to IMAX. (link)

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