Take-Two CEO Touts Generative AI as the Future and a Job Creator—Months After Saying GTA 6’s Creative Genius Is Human
AI is being crowned the next engine of growth for every industry—and the scramble to embed it everywhere has already begun.
Take-Two is turning up the volume on AI. At The Paley Center for Media, CEO Strauss Zelnick called generative AI the future of technology and argued it will grow jobs, not erase them. Coming from the company behind Rockstar (GTA, Red Dead) and 2K (Borderlands 4, BioShock, Mafia), that is a notable pivot from their usually quieter stance on this stuff.
What Zelnick is selling
"It will not reduce employment, it will increase employment."
He tied it to a familiar pattern: new tech boosts productivity, which boosts GDP, which boosts employment.
To make the point land, he reached for an old-but-effective stat: in 1865, roughly 65% of the US workforce was in agriculture. Today, around 2% of the population produces a mountain of food. His takeaway: overall employment went up anyway, and you do not hear people lamenting they cannot get farm jobs.
He also pushed back on AI hype where it actually matters to his business. Zelnick said AI is useful across industries but it is not going to conjure up a genius or hand you a hit game. In his words, it is essentially data run through a lot of computers with a language model strapped on top. Datasets look backward, creativity looks forward; if AI looks forward, it is only because it is predicting patterns, not inventing something truly new.
Where that clashes with the mood
This rosy jobs outlook is not universally shared. There are studies forecasting AI-driven job losses without much of a GDP bump. OpenAI boss Sam Altman has warned about job loss, full stop. And inXile chief (and Fallout veteran) Brian Fargo has said he is worried about job loss tied to the tech. So yes, Zelnick is swimming against a pretty strong current here.
- Zelnick: AI will lift employment via productivity and GDP growth; useful tool, not an auteur or hit-maker
- Some reports: expect more jobs lost and little GDP upside
- Sam Altman: expects job loss
- Brian Fargo: worried about job loss in games
How this squares with his earlier comments
Worth noting: this is not a full-on AI lovefest. A few months back, Zelnick was very clear that GTA 6’s creative genius is human, and he said creators should be compensated if their work gets reused or trained on by AI after the fact. That line still holds with what he is saying now: AI can help, but it is not the author.
The awkward reality check
And because AI keeps teeing up bizarre moments, there is this: Google’s AI Overview recently told people GTA 6 has a twerk button. Why? Because one dedicated troll spent three months seeding the internet with that lie and later admitted, "I didn’t even try to make anything with convincing evidence." Not exactly confidence-inspiring.
Bottom line: Zelnick is bullish on AI as a job creator and production tool, but he is not pretending it will write Rockstar’s next masterpiece. That nuance matters, even if the optimism is going to raise some eyebrows among the people actually making games right now.