No, GTA6 is not going to have Generative AI for NPCs
I’ve seen articles and videos explaining how GTA6 is going to have Generative AI for NPCs and other parts of the game.
This is clearly some over excitable thinking without really understanding what it means.
For one, GTA6 has been in development for at least 10 years. They will have already long recorded the audio of NPCs. ChatGPT really only caught the zeitgeist in the last 2 years, 3 if you’re generous. The game is going to be released, most likely in the next 12 months.
Rockstar are not going to throw away all their years of work to swap out some, still experimental, technology in the last rush to release.
Next, Generative AI is expensive.
I think there are three ways Rockstar could implement Generative AI for its NPCs.
It could:
- Use a third party service such as OpenAI
- It could run it’s own
- It could implement it locally
First, using a third party service would be crazy expensive. Think how many people would be using the service on the first day, how many times, and how many requests need to be made. I just cannot see how it would be worth it.
Perhaps Rockstar decide to roll their own. It’s a bold decision training a new LLM on a fictional environment. Expensive to train and still expensive to run with all those GPUs it would need.
Both these options would require single player to be an online only experience. Some game companies have tried that in the past, but we’re not there yet.
Finally perhaps Rockstar decides to run an LLM locally on your gaming device. That is compute that you are using that won’t be used to make the game look good on your screen.
Sure, lower power LLMs exist such as from DeepSeek, but this is a relatively new invention so Rockstar would have decided to become the world’s best AI company rather than a gaming company in the last few years.
Another aspect is moderation. How does Rockstar know, for certain that what the content generated is right for the environment. Will it know to generate Liberty City rather than New York for example? That could lead to lawsuits and Rockstar is generally opposed to being on the receiving end of those.
Finally, another aspect that people overlook is that Generative AI is pretty slow. It’s hidden nicely on the OpenAI UI but typically it loads in slower than you can read.
Sure the Santa AI was pretty convincing but it takes a non human beat to respond. How would that work in a game? NPCs see a car speeding past and by the time they say anything it’s long gone. That’s the expensive compute wasted.
If Rockstar does use Generative AI I think it will be for precomputed simulations of NPCs voices and stock phrases that get stored in game.
I think what is happening is that people are seeing Rockstar looking to use procedural generation, like Minecraft, and have somehow leapt to Generative AI, for clicks.