What just happened? Almost two months since its CEO announced that Take-Two Interactive was "actively embracing generative AI," the owner of Rockstar Games has suddenly laid off a portion of its AI team, including its Head of Artificial Intelligence.
The revelation came from Luke Dicken, who was made Take-Two's Head of AI in early 2025. He wrote in a LinkedIn post that "It's truly disappointing that I have to share with you that my time with T2 – and that of my team – has come to an end."
Kotaku writes that Dicken joined Take-Two after a decade at Zynga – Take-Two bought the company, known for social video games such as FarmVille, CityVille, and YoVille, for $12.7 billion in 2022. The publication adds that much of Take-Two's AI team appears to have been established from Zynga's existing applied AI department.
According to Dicken's LinkedIn profile, he had been the architect of Zynga's overarching Generative AI strategy before becoming Take-Two's AI boss.
Dicken never revealed why he is no longer at Take-Two or how many people from his team were also leaving the gaming giant.
The timing of the departures is somewhat surprising. It was only at the start of February when Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick jumped on the trend of publicly announcing his love of all things AI. However, in a move likely planned to reduce backlash, he emphasized that generative AI has "zero part" in GTA 6.
Zelnick's praise of AI was a response to a question about Google's Project Genie. The experimental system transforms simple text instructions into short, explorable video environments – interactive worlds, essentially.
Google's announcement of Project Genie caused Take-Two's stock price to fall to an 11-month low, a reaction that Zelnick said left him "a little confused."
Take-Two president Karl Slatoff was also dismissive of Google's tool. "Genie is early in its iteration at this point and trying to make a comparison to a game engine is just really – they're not even in the same ballpark. Genie is not a game engine," he said.
We've become used to seeing companies making huge layoffs as a result of generative AI automating tasks and making some jobs obsolete. A recent case saw Kingdom Come: Deliverance II developer Warhorse Studios axe a translator because his role was being filled by the technology.
Take-Two's decision to remove humans whose job it is to implement AI within a company is rare, but it could be the start of a trend. The backlash against Nvidia over DLSS 5 making games look like AI slop was enormous. OpenAI recently discontinued Sora. And games continue to be slammed when people even suspect the presence of AI-generated content.