Publisher Take Two has reportedly laid off their AI team:

https://www.eurogamer.net/take-two-lays-off-ai-team

In the words of CEO Strauss Zelnick: "Every entertainment business that was supposed to be destroyed by new technology hasn't been," he said recently. "When I was a little kid, calculators came along and parents were all up in arms that now schools would not teach kids math[s] because they had access to calculators. Well, people are learning math[s] today, even though there are calculators."

And people are dumber relying on a crutch for it. The more we rely on a crutch the less ability we have to problem solve for ourselves. Tools are great but don't let it do all the work for you.

Exactly. If someone only ever uses a calculator to do all the math for them, it can dull their math skills. I remember one time in middle school back in like 1993-94 I was part of a quiz bowl thing as an extracurricular (think team-based Jeopardy) and were were asked to add two three-digit numbers. Everybody pulled out pencil & paper to try to do it. I crunched the numbers in my head, rang in first, and got it right. Everybody just kinda looked at me funny, like "How did he do that?" Any kind of simple calculation you should be able to do in your head without needing a machine. Decades later at my last job I had a customer complaining to a co-worker that he didn't get the right money back for a return. I took a look at his receipt and what he got back, and quickly determined that he did indeed get the right amount of money back. When he still insisted, that's when I pulled out the calculator app on my phone to shut him up once and for all. Once he saw the number on the screen match what he got back, he finally relented. 17 years in retail showed me that most people suck at math, and maybe some of them would have been better if they didn't rely on a calculator as a crutch for every little thing.

TL;DR: It's not a good thing to have machines do all thinking for us. Especially if it's being used as an excuse by the capitalist class to axe a bunch of jobs.

Yeah, pretty much this, we're already seeing society getting dumbed down as people outsource their thinking or their writing to Chat GPT or Grok instead of thinking for themselves. The brain is like anything else, you use it or lose it.

In the context of gaming, there's also the issue of AI generated content just generally being shit quality and inferior to human work.

The article and the statement go opposite ways, I don't understand why it was added to the article if not to show contradiction between what was said and what was done, if you follow the logic in the statements Take Two should embrace AI (calculator), not get rid of it.

The point of the quote is that the "AI will replace human workers" nonsense is as dumb as thinking calculators would replace teaching kids math.

And then they proceed to fire the entire team of humans behind their AI project?

The humans in question weren't replaced with AI though, the company simply decided they didn't need AI.

While people losing their jobs isn't ideal and they can hopefully find another job, companies moving away from AI is in itself a positive move.

But isn't the calculator so good tho? Why get rid of it then? Just to be clear, I'm only questioning the logic and not you for posting it.

In the sense of this article that statement is really a contradiction.

Either the calculator is good and not scary and they would be embracing it, but they got rid of it together with the teachers that were implementing it on school.

Or the calculator is not good and they got rid of it and its teachers, while the newspaper reporting it says the school actually has no problems with calculators.

It's not that literal, more just an example of how predictions that x thing will destroy/replace y thing have been wrong before.