Take-Two CEO expresses down-to-earth take on AI: 'It's a great thing' but also a 'parlor trick'

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has a measured take on AI, saying that it's a 'great thing' but it has limitations, and it won't create hits out of thin air.

Take-Two CEO expresses down-to-earth take on AI: 'It's a great thing' but also a 'parlor trick'
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Senior Gaming Editor
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TL;DR: Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick views AI as a practical tool, not a creative miracle, emphasizing it combines big data and predictive models but cannot independently create genius or hit games. He highlights AI's role in accelerating game development while cautioning against overestimating its creative capabilities.

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Grand Theft Auto parent company Take-Two Interactive, has a level-headed take on AI and cautions the industry to see it for what it really is--a tool, not a creative magic wand.

Take-Two CEO expresses down-to-earth take on AI: 'It's a great thing' but also a 'parlor trick' 2
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AI is here, and it's not going away. Artificial intelligence is finding its way in pretty much all forms of technology, especially media content production. Gaming companies are using AI in the hope of accelerating games development, which on the surface seems like wizardry, but one CEO dispels all the buzzword trickery and exposes the technology in a more practical lens.

That CEO is Strauss Zelnick, a businessman who's had more reserved, conservative, and reasonable public takes on key video games industry trends--especially artificial intelligence.

At the recent Paley International Media Summit held in Silicon Valley, Zelnick discussed AI, what it is, and how it will be used. AI is a "great thing," but it's a tool, similar not necessarily to a paintbrush to the artist--AI is more akin to the easel, the chair the artist sits in, etc.

Zelnick starts out by defining AI and calling it a kind of predictive model that can align with creative thinking and processes:

"It's a combination of metadata with a parlor trick," the Take-Two CEO said.

"What AI is, is the combination of big datasets with a bunch of compute within natural LLM-a large language model. And by definition, a data set is what? Backward-looking. By definition, creativity is what? Forward-looking. And to the extent that AI appears to be forward-looking, it is what? A predictive model."

AI, even generative AI like Microsoft's MUSE, won't be able to make great games on its own, though.

"AI is a great thing. It's a great thing for every industry. Will it recreate or create genius? No. Will it create hits? No. It's a bunch of data with a bunch of compute with a language model attached."

"Those are convenient ways to explain to human beings what looks like magic. The bottom line is that these are digital tools and we've used digital tools forever."