Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser is using AI, but cautions “it’s not as useful as some companies would have you believe yet”

Rockstar Games co-founder and Absurd Ventures founder Dan Houser has broken rank with many of his industry peers, acknowledging that while he and his team are “dabbling” in AI, “it’s not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet”.

In an interview with the Channel 4 show Sunday Brunch to publicise his new book, A Better Paradise, Houser admitted that the games industry “can either go somewhere really interesting or somewhere that gets overly focused on making money,” adding: “There’s always that danger with any commercial artform that [companies] get distracted by money.”

“With all these technology companies, people get rich and powerful on a scale almost nobody’s ever seen before,” Houser said, as transcribed by our sister site, Eurogamer.

“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.”

Reflecting on Absurd Ventures’ current work-in-progress, Houser said: “In the story, yeah, there’s lots of AI characters. 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. 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. A lot of those processes, computers are already doing [them]. So some of it’s just to sell AI stock, or convince everyone this is transformative, and other stuff it does is amazing.”

Absurd is currently working on “a bold new visions with diverse new IP universes across a wide array of mediums,” including live-action and video game projects, the latter of which will need “another few years in development”.

Last week, Anno 117: Pax Romana developer Ubisoft admitted an AI-generated image had “slipped through [its] review process” and was included in the final build.