Edward Saatchi on virtual beings: AI is the next great art form

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
May 17, 2020
Updated June 20, 2025
11 min

Edward Saatchi, the CEO of Fable Studio and maker of Emmy-winning virtual reality experiences, participated in a thoughtful conversation about “virtual beings” at our recent GamesBeat Summit 2020 event.

I called the session “We are who we pretend to be,” after the moral of story in one of my favorite novels, Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. The novel is about an American spy in World War II who does too good a job at his cover role of being a Nazi propagandist. The moral is: “We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.