Strauss Zelnick, CEO of a video game publisher take-two interactivesaid he is not a “naysayer” when it comes to the promise of artificial intelligence. But at the same time, Zelnick, whose company publishes the Grand Theft Auto, NBA 2K, Red Dead and Borderlands video game series, said there are “still limited” signs that the technology will impact game development and production.
There are two reasons for that, Zelnick told a room of technology executives at CNBC’s Technology Executive Council Summit in New York on Tuesday.
Intellectual property is the number one reason why AI companies are increasingly at odds with Hollywood, musicians, and other creative industries.
“We have to protect our intellectual property, but more than that, we have to be considerate of others,” Strauss told CNBC’s Steve Kobach in an interview at the CNBC event. “Even if AI creates intellectual property, it cannot be protected.”
A data rights clash between content owners and the AI industry has led to a series of licensing agreements, lawsuits, and continued criticism as AI companies continue to seek more datasets to train large-scale language models.
However, with the release last month of OpenAI’s video creation app Sora, the debate took a different turn. The application allows users to generate near-realistic short-form AI videos through prompts. This opens the door to new concerns around deepfakes and the use of voices and likenesses of any person, not just famous actors, musicians, or anime characters.
Strauss said that when it comes to the use of AI by game publishers like Take-Two, it’s not only important that the content created complies with copyright law, but also that people’s rights are protected. “There are constraints,” he said.
But perhaps a bigger hurdle, he believes, is at the heart of why the company continues to be successful when it comes to leveraging AI further in game creation.
“Let’s say there were no constraints[when it comes to AI]. Could you press a button tomorrow and create the equivalent of a ‘Grand Theft Auto’ marketing plan?” he said. “The answer is no. A, you can’t do it yet, and B, I think you’re not going to end up very good. You end up being pretty derivative.”
Strauss said this is because AI is inherently “backward-looking” because its calculations are tied to big data sets of old information.
He said that what AI produces often feels new because it uses predictive models. “And there are a lot of things in the world that can be predicted based on data,” he said, adding that there are many things that can be solved with data.
That might help solve something as complex as a cure for a disease or as simple as a biology homework assignment, but when it comes to creating the multilayered universes that Take-Two’s video games have become known for, Strauss said, it’s a different story.
“Anything that has to do with backwards data calculations is very beneficial to that, and that applies to a lot of things,” he said. “What we’re doing at Take-Two, anything that doesn’t come with it is going to be really, really bad.”
Maintaining a creative edge was critical to Take-Two. Take-Two is one of the last surviving public video game developers. microsoft Acquired Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in 2023, electronic arts announced last month that it would be acquired by Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners in an all-cash deal valued at $55 billion.
“We aim to create enduring franchises,” Strauss said, noting that Take-Two has 11 franchises that have sold at least 5 million games upon release, in addition to more than 20 popular mobile games.
The next installment of the company’s biggest series, Grand Theft Auto, is scheduled to be released in May 2026, and is likely to set new sales records. The previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, sold $1 billion in the first three days of its release in 2013, Strauss said.
“The team’s creativity is extraordinary, and what Rockstar Games (Take-Two subsidiary) is trying to do, and what we’ve done over and over again, is create something that’s close to perfect,” he said. “AI models are data-driven, so there is no creativity that can exist by definition,” Strauss added.
