Miyamoto on AI: Why Human Creativity Won't Go Obsolete

Days after Sakurai warned that AI games will be mostly unplayable, the guy who made Mario and Zelda weighed in, and he's way calmer about it. Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't think generative AI makes human creators obsolete. He thinks it exposes who actually has ideas.

What Miyamoto said about AI

• Where: A press conference marking his selection for Japan's Order of Culture, one of the country's highest honors.
• Reported by: Japan's Game Watch, translated by VGC on October 23, 2026.
• Main point: As AI takes over production work, an individual creator's vision matters more, not less.
• His comparison: The jump from typewriters to word processors. Better tools didn't kill design, they made a designer's natural sense of layout easier to see.
• The warning: He separates "creating" from the "labor" of building. With lower barriers, some devs may confuse enjoying the grind with having made something good.
• On copycats: Copy-paste designs rarely last, because they lack the creator's intent.

His bottom line, in VGC's translation: even if AI ends up handling everything, "there will always be a role left for us to play."

Where Nintendo actually stands

Miyamoto speaking positively is not Nintendo announcing AI in its games. The company still hasn't confirmed whether it uses generative AI in development. President Shuntaro Furukawa has acknowledged the tech's creative potential while flagging intellectual-property risks, and Nintendo's leadership keeps putting human creativity front and center.

It also lands in a loud week for AI and games: Sakurai's "unplayable" warning, Epic walking back parts of its AI MegaJam rules, and an Xbox manager telling devs that avoiding AI is planning for a "fake future."

The 2nd Shift take

Sakurai and Miyamoto are closer than the headlines make it look. Both are saying the same thing from opposite ends: AI makes the busywork cheap, so taste becomes the whole game. Sakurai sees the flood of junk that comes first. Miyamoto sees the creators who rise above it. We think they're both right, and that's the real lesson for anyone making stuff right now, whether that's levels, thumbnails, or music: the tool is not the skill. If you're figuring out where you land as a creator in all this, our CRAFTR Quiz takes about two minutes.

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Keep reading: Sakurai Warns AI Games Will Be Mostly 'Unplayable' · Xbox Manager: Devs Avoiding AI Are 'Planning for a Fake Future'

Sources: VGC (via Game Watch), Game World Observer