Rockstar co-founder and former Grand Theft Auto writer Dan Houser has likened AI to mad cow disease, and claimed that humanity is being pulled in a direction “by a certain group of people who maybe aren’t fully rounded humans.”
The impact of AI has been swift and forceful, with the emergence of tech such as ChatGPT fueling an economic bubble some worry will burst. The way the internet works is being reshaped, too, with the idea of fair use of content for the training of AI models at loggerheads with copyright protection. This has resulted in ongoing lawsuits. Disney and Universal, for example, have sued the AI image creator Midjourney, alleging that the company improperly used and distributed AI-generated characters from their movies. Disney also sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI, warning the startup to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
Enter Dan Houser, who left Rockstar in 2020 to found Absurd Ventures having worked on pretty much all the studio’s games up to that point. His new novel, A Better Paradise, is a story that revolves around AI, and so it stands to reason that he would be asked about the tech in a recent interview with Virgin Radio UK.
It’s fair to say Houser is sceptical about the future of AI.
“Some of these people trying to define the future of humanity, creativity or whatever it is, using AI, are not the most humane or creative people,” he said. “So they’re sort of saying we’re better at being human than you are. And it’s obviously not true.
“That is one of the other things we’re trying to capture, that humanity is being pulled in a direction by a certain group of people who maybe aren’t fully rounded humans.”
He continued: “I think that AI is going to eventually eat itself. As far as I understand it, which is really superficial understanding, the models scour the internet for information, but the internet’s going to get more and more full of information made by the models. So it’s sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.
“I can’t see how the information is going to get better. They’re already running out of data. It will do some tasks brilliantly but it’s not going to do every task brilliantly. It’s going to become this sort of mirror of itself.
“I’m slightly obsessed by the fact that when you search for the same thing again, it doesn’t give you the same answers. And it’s wrong a lot of the time, but it says it so confidently.”
Houser is talking here about what happens when AI models start training on their own output, which experts say puts them at risk of collapsing. The Large Language Models, or LLMs, that power the likes of ChatGPT are said to be cannibalizing themselves via Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Or, as Houser puts it, “it’s sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.”
The use of AI in entertainment is one of the hottest topics across video games, movies, and television. Last month, the CEO of Genvid — the company behind choose-your-own-adventure interactive series like Silent Hill Ascension — claimed “consumers generally do not care” about generative AI in games, stating: “Gen Z loves AI slop.”
But there is some pushback. This week, Epic Games came under fire for what fans believe to be AI generated art in Fortnite.
Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
