Dan Houser warns AI is like mad cow disease as models risk eating themselves

Rockstar Games Co-Founder Warns AI Models Eat Themselves

Dan Houser, the Rockstar Games co-founder who helped shape Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, has issued a pointed warning about the future of Artificial Intelligence in the gaming industry. Speaking on Virgin Radio UK's Chris Evans Breakfast Show while promoting his science fiction novel "A Better Paradise," Houser drew a disturbing parallel between AI and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease1

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. "AI is going to eventually eat itself," Houser said, explaining that as AI models scour the internet for training data, they increasingly encounter AI-generated content rather than original human work1

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. "So it's sort of like when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease," he added2

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Model Collapse and the Recursive Loop Threatening Quality

Houser's concerns center on what experts call model collapse, a phenomenon where AI models trained on synthetic data produced by other models begin to degrade in quality1

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. This recursive loop, combined with dead internet theory—the notion that the internet is increasingly populated by AI bots and AI-generated content—could lead to an internet that gets eaten from the inside out1

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. "I can't see how the information gets better if there's not... they were already running out of data," Houser explained2

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. "Algorithms will become saturated by the definition of how they are sourced and how they are therefore constructed, and it's going to become this sort of mirror of itself." His warning comes as a recent Google Cloud survey of 615 developers found that nearly nine in ten studios already use AI agents somewhere in their pipelines, with many deploying them for real-time NPC behavior, tutorials, and automated testing2

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Gaming Industry Splits on Generative AI in Video Game Development

Houser's remarks stand in stark contrast to the direction many in the gaming industry are taking. Tim Sweeney, CEO at Epic Games, has bet heavily on generative AI in video game development and even became publicly irate when gaming platform Steam began labeling games containing AI-generated content1

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. Major publishers like Ubisoft, Square Enix, Electronic Arts, and Krafton have announced significant generative AI pushes, often following widespread layoffs across the video game industry2

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Kelsey Falter, CEO of indie studio Mother Games, recently told Decrypt, "If you're not on the AI bandwagon right now, you're already behind"2

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. Jack Buser, global games director at Google Cloud, warned that studios unable to adapt may not survive, stating, "Some of these game companies are going to make it, and some of them are not"2

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Criticism of AI Executives and Concerns About Human Creativity

Beyond technical concerns, Houser took aim at the executives pushing AI adoption, suggesting they "maybe aren't fully-rounded humans"2

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. "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 said on Virgin Radio UK4

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. "They're sort of saying, 'we're better at being human than you are,' and it's obviously not true"4

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. His concerns about the human touch in gaming echo those of Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take Two Interactive—the parent company of Rockstar Games, which Houser left in 20201

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. Zelnick took a skeptical tone on AI last year, saying he doubts the tech is "going to make things cheaper, quicker, better, or easier to make hits" and that "the machines can't make the creative decisions for you"1

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Absurd Ventures Dabbles in AI Despite Warnings

Despite his pessimistic outlook on AI eating up the world, Houser admitted in an interview with Channel 4's "Sunday Brunch" that his new firm Absurd Ventures is "dabbling in using AI"1

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. However, he cautioned that AI isn't the magic solution its proponents claim. "The truth is a lot of it's not as useful as some of the companies would have you believe yet," he said1

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. "It's not going to solve all of the problems." Houser also expressed fascination with AI's inconsistency, noting, "I'm slightly obsessed by the fact that when you search for the same thing again, it doesn't give you the same answer. It's wrong a lot of the time, but it says it so confidently"2

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. His warnings extend beyond technical degradation in quality to potential legal and ethical questions, such as AI-powered NPCs encouraging harmful behavior—scenarios that have already occurred with consumer-facing chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT1

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. The ongoing debate over copyright protection and fair use of content for training AI models has resulted in lawsuits, with Disney and Universal suing AI image creator Midjourney for allegedly using copyrighted characters5

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