Rockstar Games co-founder and GTA 5 writer Dan Houser is dabbling with AI technology with his next game, but admitted “it’s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet”.
Houser appeared on Channel 4 show Sunday Brunch at the weekend, discussing the state of the games industry and rapid developments in AI technology.
“With all things [the games industry] can either go somewhere really interesting or somewhere that gets overly focused on making money,” said Houser of the future of the industry. “There’s always that danger with any commercial artform that [companies] get distracted by money. But I think there’s still a big ceiling creatively to make these kinds of living narrative experiences. I think that’s what we were always trying to do [with the GTA games].”
Houser appeared on the show ostensibly to promote his new book, A Better Paradise, on mainstream TV. Not only is the novel inspired by the AI revolution, making games, and the growth of technology during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s also in the same world as his next game.
Houser left Rockstar in 2020 to set up Absurd Ventures. Earlier this year, Houser lifted the lid on the studio’s big project: Absurdaverse. Both his book and the studio’s game will be set in the same world, but tell different stories.
“With all these technology companies, people get rich and powerful on a scale almost nobody’s ever seen before,” Houser said on the wider technological context of the book. “They’re give or take the richest people who ever lived and in some ways the most powerful people who ever lived in terms of influencing the world. And all the companies start out the same way: ‘we’re here to make things better, we’re here to help people, we’re here to fix the world’. And then they get this kind of Faustian moment where ‘we’re also going to get extremely rich and extremely powerful’. And things get corrupted.”
The game is still “another few years in development” he confirmed, but AI is informing both the story and the game’s development.
“In the story yeah there’s lots of AI characters,” said Houser. “We are dabbling in using AI. The truth is a lot of it’s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet. It’s not going to solve all of the problems.”
Discussing game development further, he added: “We have a whole field of areas we need technology for and AI’s great at some of the tasks and can’t do the other tasks yet. So [AI companies] will claim it can solve every single problem and it really can’t yet. As far as I understand it, it’s a sort of hold-all term for all future computing and it’s not really doing a lot of the stuff yet. But if we all give it all of our money, it might do in the future.”
And while a lot of chatter about AI is full of soundbites, Houser said this is often “to sell AI stock, or to convince everyone this is transformative”, but admitted some use cases are “amazing”.
At the very least, Houser’s novel appears timely. AI has become a huge talking point in the games industry in the past couple of years. Keywords Studios, for instance, has been experimenting with AI technology to see how it can be used for remasters; Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot believes AI is as big a revolution as the shift to 3D; and Nexon CEO Jungun Lee said it’s “important to assume that every game company is now using AI”.
Other developers are firmly against using AI technology. “Maybe AI is a creative solution if you aren’t a creative person,” said the developers of Dispatch, for instance. PUBG creator Brendan Greene, meanwhile, said he was “really heartened to see the community revolt against AI stuff”.
