I been thinking about what Strauss Zelnick said at that CNBC tech thing, and honestly, he don’t think AI’s ever gonna make a game like Grand Theft Auto 6. He kinda laughed about it too, saying machines can only copy what’s already there. They look backward, not forward.
He talked about how folks keep saying AI can “create,” but he’s like nah, it can’t really invent nothing new. It just mixes up old stuff in a fancy way. He’s been calling AI an “oxymoron” for a while now, which is kinda funny if you think on it.
Zelnick said AI might help with some boring work inside Take-Two like numbers, planning, maybe speed things up but the real magic comes from people. “Genius is human,” that’s how he put it. You could feel he really means it, you know?
He even started talking about laws and morals and all that. Said we gotta guard our ideas but also respect others’. Because AI art and writing don’t really belong to anybody, and that makes a big mess for copyright. That’s a huge deal if you’re running a game company.
What bugged him most, he said, was how AI just recycles old data. He called it “backward looking.” Like, if you tried to make a GTA-style marketing plan with AI today, he joked, “you’d get something kinda lame, maybe half-good but not special.”
He thinks computers can crunch numbers all day long and be fine at that, but when it’s time to dream up something totally fresh? Nah, not happening. “Anything based on old data yeah, AI’s great for that,” he said. “But things that ain’t about that? It’s terrible.”
When he mentioned Rockstar Games, you could tell he’s proud. He said they always push for perfection, that “almost perfect” thing only humans can chase. “There’s no such thing as creativity in AI,” he said plain. “It’s all just data, and data can’t dream.”
Some people at the summit think AI will make the next big leap in creativity. Zelnick kinda stands on the other side, saying it’s just a nice helper tool but not the artist.
The CNBC Technology Executive Council Summit was the big stage for this talk lots of tech bosses there, chatting about AI, cybersecurity, jobs, all that.
And everyone’s still hyped for Grand Theft Auto 6, which got pushed back to May 26, 2026. People been waiting forever, so the pressure’s on Rockstar to blow minds again.
Zelnick’s point at the end hit hard though. He said Take-Two’s always gonna bet on people first. Maybe AI helps a little, but humans, they’re the ones who make something truly wild, something that lasts. And that’s what he says will keep the games great trusting the human brain, not the code.
Strauss Zelnick talked again about how he don’t believe AI can ever really make something like *Grand Theft Auto 6*, no matter how smart it gets. He said machines only know what already happened, so they can’t dream up new ideas the way people do. He kinda laughed, saying if you asked AI to build the next GTA plan, you’d just get a cheap copy that looks fancy but got no soul. He called AI “backward looking,” like it’s stuck in the past, and he kept saying that true genius only comes from people. For him, creativity ain’t just mixing data it’s about feeling, instinct, and risk, and no computer can fake that, not even close.
