In a wide-ranging new interview, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive (the parent company of Rockstar Games), delivered a clear message to fans and investors worried about artificial intelligence: AI is not coming for GTA 6. Instead, it will act as a powerful creative tool to make development faster and more efficient — while the real magic of a Rockstar hit will always come from human genius.
The comments were made during an interview with The Game Business host Chris Dring on Tuesday, just days before GTA 6's long-awaited Fall 2026 launch window. Zelnick addressed everything from the game's massive player base to in-game advertising, but the standout remarks focused on AI — a topic that has rattled Wall Street and sparked heated debates across the industry.
AI Can Build Assets — But Only Humans Build Hits
Zelnick was blunt about the limits of the technology. He acknowledged that AI creation tools are “quite obvious[ly]… beneficial for our industry,” yet he pushed back hard against the idea that they could replace the creative soul of a game like Grand Theft Auto VI or Red Dead Redemption.
“These tools may help you create assets, but that won’t help you create hits,” he explained. “There are loads of assets out there now. It doesn’t matter if you push a button to create an asset, or it takes you six weeks… at the end of the day, you have an asset. And thousands of mobile games are launched every year, and there are only a handful of hits.”
He went even further: “Equally, sure, you can create assets that might look like a big release… but creating a hit of that magnitude is a completely different animal and does require human engagement. It does require human creativity.”
Zelnick stressed that “technology cannot and will never” produce the best entertainment on the planet — that remains Take-Two’s core mission. He called the notion of one person simply “push[ing] a button” to generate, market, and sell a mega-hit “a laughable notion” that has never been true in entertainment history.
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AI’s Real Role: Efficiency, Not Replacement
Rather than fearing AI, Zelnick sees it as a game-changer for the boring stuff. He believes the technology will have an “enormous impact across all industries in terms of making mundane office work essentially more efficient or unnecessary.” For Rockstar’s massive teams, that means faster prototyping, quicker asset generation, and more time for the creative minds to focus on storytelling, gameplay, and the iconic open-world detail fans expect from GTA.
This stance is consistent with Zelnick’s previous comments over the past year. He has repeatedly emphasized that while AI tools are already being used at Take-Two, the “creative genius is human.”
GTA 6 Will Still Draw the Crowd — With or Without AI
Zelnick also brushed aside other concerns. On player demographics, he joked that the 13-year gap since GTA V won’t be a problem: “Oh, I think we’re gonna have a lot of 17 year olds playing GTA 6.” He quipped that anyone with a console over 17 who skips the game would be hard to imagine.
He also shut down speculation about real-world ads flooding the game. Full-price titles shouldn’t feel like free-to-play experiences, he said: “Very difficult for me to believe that we would want to have interstitial advertising in a game that someone paid 70 or 80 bucks for would seem unfair.”
What This Means for Fans
For the millions eagerly counting down to GTA 6, Zelnick’s words are reassuring. The game that Rockstar has been meticulously crafting for over a decade won’t be rushed or diluted by AI. Instead, the technology is likely helping the studio polish Vice City, refine Lucia and Jason’s story, and deliver the level of detail that has defined the series.
As Zelnick put it, AI won’t level the playing field for creating cultural phenomena — it will simply give the best teams even better tools to do what they already do best.
The full interview is available on The Game Business’ YouTube channel. With GTA 6 on the horizon, these comments from the top of Take-Two suggest the future of Rockstar’s masterpiece is in very human hands — supercharged by AI, but never replaced by it.
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