Rockstar Cofounder Says AI Is Like When Factory Farms Did Cannibalism and Caused Mad Cow Disease

""AI is going to eventually eat itself," said Houser during an interview last week at the "Chris Evans Breakfast Show" on Virgin Radio UK while promoting his science fiction novel" A Better Paradise." "The [AI] 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.""

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

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

Dan Houser likened AI to mad cow disease, warning that models trained on internet content will increasingly ingest AI-generated material. He stated that AI models scour the internet and that growing volumes of model-made information could create a self-reinforcing feedback loop. The video game industry faces mass layoffs while executives pursue AI to cut costs, increase profits, and attract new players. Optimists predict AI-driven games will enable dynamic, immersive storytelling, while skeptics fear degraded quality, loss of human nuance, and janky, soulless game worlds. The combination of dead internet theory and model collapse raises concerns that AI training on AI outputs could erode model performance and content quality.

Read at Futurism