Funny cause I went to DR expecting this and every Dominican person I met led with calling me their brother and being intentional about celebrating that we were both black.
The CEO of Take-Two, the company behind GTA, just said something the entire AI industry doesn't want to hear.
And he said it without being anti-AI.
Strauss Zelnick's argument is precise. AI is built on datasets. Datasets are backward-looking. Creativity is forward-looking. A model trained on everything that already exists cannot, by definition, produce something genuinely unexpected. And all hits, by their very nature, are unexpected.
Asset creation and hit creation are not the same thing. AI is getting very good at the first one. The second one is what actually makes money, builds franchises, and changes culture. Nobody has shown AI can do that yet.
The derivative property problem is real. You can clone GTA with existing technology. You could do it before AI. It would take 3 years and look identical. It still wouldn't sell. Because it isn't GTA. It's a clone of GTA.
And consumers, despite what the industry occasionally pretends, can feel the difference between something genuinely new and something assembled from the residue of things that already worked.
Thousands of mobile games ship every year. 0 to 5 hits get made. The same studios make them every time. The technology to make more games has been commoditized for years. It didn't democratize hit creation. It just flooded the market with more forgettable product.
The Silicon Valley thesis that AI unlocks game creation for everyone is true in the same way that cheap cameras unlocked filmmaking for everyone. They did. And the same 5 studios still make the movies everyone watches.
What Zelnick is saying, without quite saying it, is that the thing AI cannot replicate is taste. The instinct for what hasn't been done yet. The cultural antenna that detects the gap in the market before the data can see it.
Data tells you what people wanted. Hits tell people what they want next.
Those are different jobs.
Corporate life will teach you that knowing the job is only half the battle.
The real skill is staying calm in meetings, reading the room, managing ego, receiving vague feedback, and not replying emails with your real thoughts.
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.
The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.
In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.
“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.
“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc
Hailey Baptiste is a professional tennis player born and raised in Washington, D.C.. She grew up near the Rock Creek Park Tennis Center, began playing at age four, and trained at the Junior Tennis Champions Center in College Park, Maryland.
Baptiste just beat the No. 1 ranked women's tennis player in the world, Aryna Sabalenka! #DMVPride @JTCCtennis
Five-time NBA All-Star John Wall has become the president of basketball operations at Howard University, returning to Washington, D.C. to partner with the top-ranked HBCU in the country, school officials tell ESPN.