Rockstar Founder Dan Houser Compares AI to Mad Cow Disease

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 Global, 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.

!Dan Houser believes AI will eventually eat itself.Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images.

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 s