Sony Group president and chief executive officer Hiroki Totoki and Take-Two Interactive chief executive officer Strauss Zelnick both told the Paley International Summit in New York City on Tuesday morning that AI will not replace human creativity in entertainment, though neither expects the technology to go away. IGN reported the remarks first, and GameSpot followed.
Totoki is the chief executive officer of the Sony Group parent company, not of the PlayStation business specifically. “I don’t think an AI could replace humans because, particularly in the entertainment field, I think creativity is quite important. Creativity is for humans, not AI,” he said, according to IGN. “How to use the technology profile is important. Of course, I encourage my people to use AI in a certain manner, but at [the] same time we try to keep the rights and rights holders and creators and artists.”
Zelnick: datasets look backward
Zelnick framed it as a matter of who uses the tools. “One of our division heads has said to his team, ‘You’re not gonna be replaced by AI, but if you’re not careful you’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI,'” he said, per IGN. “I’m fond of saying AI is a collection of datasets, compute, and large language models. That’s what it is. And datasets, by definition, are backward looking. That’s all they are. And creativity, at its best, is forward looking.”
He pointed to his own history to make the case. Zelnick said nobody expected the phrase “Grand Theft Auto” to turn into what it has become, then recalled his time as president and chief operating officer of 20th Century Fox, when the studio released Home Alone after Warner Bros. put the film into turnaround four days into production. “Everyone thought it was a disaster. And It turned out to be the highest grossing comedy of all time. So if hits are unexpected, data sets aren’t gonna get you there, no matter how fluent they are,” he said.
Where both companies stand
GameSpot notes that both companies already use AI, with PlayStation leaning on it heavily in its development processes and Take-Two using it in its workflows. GameSpot also says there is no AI in Grand Theft Auto 6.
The comments land in an especially loud week for the AI debate in games. Epic Games chief executive officer Tim Sweeney recently said AI will bring “a new golden age of gaming,” and an Xbox business strategist posted, then deleted, a claim that gaming is the only industry pretending not to use AI. Totoki and Zelnick land somewhere in between: both see AI as a tool worth adopting, but neither believes it can make the creative calls that turn a game or film into a hit.
