The president of Japanese publishing giant Square Enix, Takashi Kiryu, has said that the company intends to be "aggressive" in its application of artificial intelligence.

That's according to his New Year Letter, in which he pointed to the launch of ChatGPT as causing a race within the AI space. Kiryu added that he believed generative AI would have a colossal impact on game development.

"I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming," he wrote.

He continued: "We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions. In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities."

It is tradition for the president of Square Enix to write a letter in the New Year setting out the company's goals and focuses for the coming year. In more recent times, they have become something of a barometer for what speculative technology is exciting the company's management; Kiryu's predecessor, Yosuke Matsuda, wrote in his own letters about the impact of blockchain and Web3 in both 2022 and 2023.

Last year, Matsuda even wrote that: "Blockchain has been an object of exhilaration and a source of turmoil, but with that in the rearview mirror, we hope that blockchain games will transition to a new stage of growth in 2023."

Not only did that not even come close to being true, blockchain and Web3 tech are seemingly only worthy of one mention each in Kiryu's New Year letter.