{"id":7201,"date":"2025-12-05T19:03:33","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T19:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/rockstar-cofounder-ai-mad-cow-disease\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T19:03:33","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T19:03:33","slug":"rockstar-cofounder-ai-mad-cow-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/rockstar-cofounder-ai-mad-cow-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockstar Cofounder Says AI Is Like When Factory Farms Did Cannibalism and Caused Mad Cow Disease"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dan Houser, the cofounder of Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar Games, cast AI in gruesome terms last week by likening it to when farmers in the United Kingdom inadvertently spread bovine spongiform encephalopathy<\/a> \u2014 commonly known as mad cow disease \u2014 by feeding meal tainted with the flesh of diseased cows to healthy heifers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI is going to eventually eat itself,\u201d said Houser during an interview<\/a> last week at the \u201cChris Evans Breakfast Show\u201d on Virgin Radio UK<\/em> while promoting his science fiction novel <\/strong>\u201cA Better Paradise<\/a>.\u201d \u201cThe [AI] models scour the internet for information, but the internet\u2019s going to get more and more full of information made by the models. So it\u2019s sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

Houser\u2019s pointed remarks are striking in the context of the larger video game industry<\/a>, where huge numbers of workers have been laid off <\/a>while CEOs have gone full hog into AI<\/a> to cut cost, boost profits, and capture the next generation of gamers; case in point, Tim Sweeney, CEO at Epic Games \u2014 which makes the smash hit Fortnite \u2014 has bet big on AI<\/a> and even became publicly irate<\/a> that gaming platform Steam is labeling games that contain AI-generated assets.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s uncertain what the future will look like for an AI-driven gaming industry, and if the most optimistic predictions<\/a> that it\u2019ll enable dynamic and immersive new types of storytelling will pan out; others are doubtful, expressing fears that the quality of games will suffer<\/a> and lose an element of the human touch<\/a>, becoming soulless objects with janky environments<\/a> inhabited by twitchy NPCs.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Houser fears: a scenario that mixes together dead internet theory<\/a> \u2014 the notion that the internet is full of AI bots and AI-generated content \u2014 and the idea of model collapse<\/a>, which is when AI models trained on AI-generated content start to degrade in quality. Both could lead to an internet that gets eaten inside out<\/a> \u2014 which isn\u2019t too different from what happens when a cow catches mad cow disease<\/a>, and starts acting weirdly and losing bodily functions before ultimately dying.<\/p>\n

And we haven\u2019t even mentioned the possible legal and ethical questions that the tech could invoke in gaming \u2014 like an AI-powered NPC<\/a> in a video game encouraging a user to kill themselves, which sounds like science fiction but has happened numerous times<\/a> with consumer-facing chatbots like OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two Interactive \u2014 the parent company of Rockstar, which Houser left in 2020 \u2014 took a skeptical tone on AI last year, saying he doubts the tech is \u201cgoing to make things cheaper, quicker, better, or easier to make hits\u201d and that it should be treated as a tool with the human developer as the ultimate arbiter.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe machines can\u2019t make the creative decisions for you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That echoes Houser\u2019s view, even with his pessimistic opinions about AI eating up the world; he admitted<\/a> in an earlier interview with the UK\u2019s Channel 4<\/em> \u201cSunday Brunch\u201d show that his new firm Absurd Ventures is \u201cdabbling in using AI.\u201d But in that interview and the one with Virgin Radio UK<\/em>, Houser cautions that AI isn\u2019t the magic wand<\/a> that its most ardent proponents claim, and is only useful for certain, narrowly defined tasks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe truth is a lot of it\u2019s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet,\u201d he said on Channel 4<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to solve all of the problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> CEO of Fortnite Maker Furious That Steam Is Labeling Games With AI-Generated Assets<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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The post Rockstar Cofounder Says AI Is Like When Factory Farms Did Cannibalism and Caused Mad Cow Disease<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Dan Houser, the cofounder of Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar Games, cast AI in gruesome terms last week by likening it to when farmers in the United Kingdom inadvertently spread…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,3841,3842],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-ethics","category-future-society"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}