Dr Luke Dicken spent a decade at Zynga building its applied AI group, then served as head of AI at Take-Two Interactive from January 2025 until the team was cut in April this year. He now runs his own consultancy, LuDic AI and brings a deliberately unpopular message to PGC Nordics in a couple of weeks: be pragmatic.

Dicken's PhD was officially titled Simulated Virtual Worlds, because his university wouldn't print "games" on a doctorate. While peers worked on robotics, warehouses and space, his group were "the silly, unserious people".

That fight, he says, was won some time ago. Five or six years ago, teams would reject algorithmic level generation because their game was "this special little snowflake. Now those same people are saying, We want AI in our game."

"I've dedicated my career to advocating for the use of AI in games," he says, and now I'm like, not like this, not like this!"

Dicken describes himself as a cynic, less about the technology than "the big tech capitalism of it". He points to Anthropic, whose investors expect it to float at $2 trillion or more this month, and says the numbers don't add up.

"There is no business math that allows you to get to that number," he says. "We are seeing one of the largest misallocations of capital through the system that assures us it's the most efficient way of allocating capital."

The bigger cost for games is attention.

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