The article asks why One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda has not been consulted by frontier AI labs building world models. It argues his expertise in spatial consistency and internal logic continuity could aid generative media, gaming and simulation styling, even though low-level physics and geometry remain the domain of trained models such as World Labs' Marble.
AI can accelerate all three of gaming's core archetypes — indie developers, prophetic toolmakers and world-building studios — rather than displacing them, according to a16z's Anish, Jon and the author. Coding agents now help solo developers bridge skill gaps: one agent built a Habbo Hotel-inspired record shop in Blender and an engine, then added pet-adoption mechanics and kept the codebase backward-compatible. Jon used ChatGPT and Codex to build a Minecraft mod inspired by Ghost of Tsushima for his eight-year-old son.
Ethan Mollick argues that existing models like GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 can already do weeks of human work when properly guided, yet their capabilities remain barely used. He demonstrates this by having GPT-6 Astra turn the 1977 text adventure Zork into a playable 3D action game and having Fable 5.1 reconstruct Umberto Eco's library in 3D, placing roughly 5,000 identified books among 27,000 shelf slots. Mollick calls this gap the "capability overhang" and says users should pair AI with deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency.
Creative studio Afterimage tested GPT-6 Astra on footage from real shoots to see whether its Blender 3D skills carried over to visual effects work. Astra handled tasks ranging from replacing a dish in a moving pan to adding a building to a Brooklyn street and making a giant parade float appear outside a window in handheld iPhone footage. Some shots worked and others didn't, but the team ended up dreaming up effects they'd never have attempted before.
Ethan Mollick published an opinionated guide arguing that using AI now means running agentic systems that combine a model with tools, not just chatting with a chatbot. He recommends ChatGPT (Work and Codex modes) or Claude (Cowork and Code modes) at $20/month for real work, starting with GPT-5.6 Sol or Fable/Opus at High thinking levels, and keeping approval prompts on to guard against prompt injection. He also says Google currently has no leading frontier model or Codex/Code equivalent, though Gemini Notebook and Gemini Omni remain useful for research and video editing.