Dan Houser says the people leading the push for AI are ‘not the most humane or creative people’

Former Rockstar writer Dan Houser has delivered another criticism of generative AI, suggesting that those leading its growth aren’t the most “fully rounded” people.

In an interview with The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio, Houser was speaking about his ew book A Better Paradise Volume One: An Aftermath, which tells the story of a video game project that goes wrong when the AI created for it becomes too powerful.

Evans asked Houser if he agreed with the argument that while AI is a “combine harvester” gathering information, it will never fully replace human creativity because it can’t capture the human spirit.

Houser replied that he agreed, adding that the leaders in the drive to push generative AI to perform certain tasks aren’t necessarily the people most well-versed in those areas.

“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 explained.

“They’re sort of saying ‘we’re better at being human than you are’, and it’s obviously not true. One of the other things we’re trying to capture is that humanity is being pulled in a direction by a certain group of people who maybe aren’t fully rounded humans.”

Evans then asked if this meant Houser doesn’t believe the current wave of AI will end up being the enormous success such people want the general public to believe it will.

“As far as I understand it, I personally don’t think it will, because I think AI is eventually going to eat itself,” he replied. “Because 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 gets better, if they’re already running out of data. It will do some tasks brilliantly, but it’s not going to do every task brilliantly.”

Last week Houser made similar comments about AI during an interview on TV show Sunday Brunch, where he said his company Absurd Ventures was “dabbling in using AI” but that “the truth is a lot of it’s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet”.

Houser warned during last week’s interview that while some aspects of AI are impressive, a lot of it is doing processes “computers are already doing”, adding that “some of it’s just to sell AI stock, or to convince everyone this is transformative, and other stuff it does is amazing.”

“My experience has always been, with technological innovation, that the first 80% is quite easy, and the last 20% – to make it a perfect simulation of something in the real world – is very, very hard. So it’ll be interesting to see that last bit, how hard it is for AI, which learns in a different way to normal computing development, how quick that is or isn’t.”