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Grand Theft Auto creator Dan Houser has some mild criticisms of how the broader tech industry has been pushing AI to the rest of us.
In an interview with Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch he was asked about his company Absurd Ventures using AI to make their video games.
Dan said this:
We are dabbling in using AI, but the truth is a lot of it is not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet. It’s not going to solve all of the problems.
…We have a whole field of areas we need technology for, and AI is great at some of the tasks, and it can’t do the other tasks yet.
They will claim that it can solve every single problem, and it can’t yet. As far as I understand it’s a hold-all term for all future computing.
And it’s not doing all of the stuff yet, but if we all give it all of our money, it might do it in the future.
Why It Was Ironic That Dan Was Asked About This
Dan was asked about this in context of his project A Better Paradise. A Better Paradise started as a radio drama-style audio podcast andrecently received a book adaptation.
The irony around this is that its story is about game development itself. And in the mold of classic science fiction, a rogue computer AI is a pivotal villain in that story.
Dan Is In Sync With His Former Company Take-Two Interactive
Dan Houser is interestingly simpatico when it comes to AI with his former CEO at Take-Two Interactive, Strauss Zelnick.
Previously, Strauss spoke about how AI can’t do creative work. In another interview, he explained that generative AI is not good enough to make an entire Grand Theft Auto game on its own.
At the same time, both Dan and Strauss are optimistic about certain aspects of AI. Dan said that AI is good at specific tasks, and Strauss takes it even further.
Strauss believes that AI will lead to creating more jobs, not a reduction of available jobs. Strauss doesn’t see AI will be capable of replacing humans in the future. Instead, he thinks it will enable an increase in productivity, and so human workers will be able to do even more work as a result.
While Dan Houser stepped away from Grand Theft Auto and Rockstar games, its interesting that he remains on the same page as them on this topic. You can take this as a sign that we shouldn’t have to worry about AI in the future because of the hard limits it has.
It’s certainly amusing that Dan made these low key criticisms of AI companies like OpenAI, as it seems that that came out of nowhere. It does seem the industry may have already reached this consensus, whether some companies want to accept it or not.
