Rockstar Creator Dan Houser Explains How His Upcoming Video Game And New Novel Critiques Tech Giants And Obsession With AI
Rockstar Games creator Dan Houser shared new details about his recently released novel, A Better Paradise, that ties into his upcoming video game that he’s developing with his new company Absurd Ventures.
In an interview with Virgin Radio UK, Houser first shared, “I’m doing a new company called Absurd Ventures. And one of the projects we’re working on is a large world called A Better Paradise and this is a novel set in that world.”
As for what the novel A Better Paradise is about, Houser revealed he wrote the novel over two years ago before ChatGPT launched and the obsession with AI. In fact, he noted it was more focused on the metaverse.
Nevertheless, he shared that one of the characters Kurt Fischer has fled to Asia in the year 2041, but five years previously he “was working in a video game company that was run by a sort of pseudo messianic tech bro guy who wanted to help people. He thought he could use gaming, use some kind of metaverse to save people from all of this internet pollution. So they were going to use very advanced AI to do this. And unfortunately or fortunately their AI they created became more sentient than they hoped. And the AI was built by two engineers who don’t like each other so the AI is riddled with self-loathing.”
That AI’s name is NigelDave, who Houser describes as a “super AI they accidentally made” while another AI named Adam “is the one they were planning to make who was the sort of AI they thought could control to do their bidding. And so they accidentally made this highly sentient thing, god creature, NigelDave that only lives online, who is infinitely intelligent, but has absolutely zero wisdom or experience. So he can learn everything. He can read all of the internet, and he can watch the world through smart phone cameras, through cameras, but he can’t live in our world. So he’s kind of obsessed by human beings, wants all of these human experiences, watches human beings obsessively, but can’t be human.”
Elsewhere in the interview, he was asked if the book is his prediction for the future. He responded, “I would never have thought I was that kind of good at predicting the future. If anything, it should be set nearer to today. I think things are happening slightly faster. I put in a lot of stuff about drones and robots and thinking that was quite future looking and that’s happening already.”
He elaborated, “You can see where things are going or where they might go if things don’t get better. It was meant to be a sort of cautionary tale and you’ll go, ‘This is not pleasant and we’re heading in lots of areas in unpleasant ways.”
“I’m not a complete pessimist, but this is a lightly pessimistic version of it,” he added. “Things in the next volumes turn less pessimistic.”
Houser also noted that one of his themes is that a machine will never be able to capture the human spirit. He also shared how it critiques tech billionaires, “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. 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. Humanity is being pulled in a direction by a certain group of people who maybe aren’t fully rounded humans.”
Houser than shared his own personal thoughts on the current use and application of AI and made it clear that he does not believe it will live up to the promises many are making about it, “As far as I understand it, I personally don’t think it will. I don’t think it will because I think the 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 how we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease. I can’t see how the information gets better if there’s not-. They are already running out of data.”
“It will do some task brilliantly, but it’s not going to do every task brilliantly,” he added.
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