He created Grand Theft Auto. Now he’s back with a novel about an AI that hijacks your mind

Dan Houser was one of the minds behind the revolutionary video game series Grand Theft Auto.

Now, after leaving Rockstar Games and starting his own company, he has published a debut novel about a very different genre of gaming.

A Better Heaven is a dystopian vision of the near future where an artificial intelligence-led computer game has gone bad.

Set in a polarized world, Mark Tyburn attempts to create a virtual sanctuary for people to find shelter from the all-consuming hell of social media and reconnect with themselves.

But everything goes wrong when a mysterious, sentient AI robot named NigelDave – a “human-built hyperintelligence” – is unleashed on society, flaws included.

Readers see his thought processes as he struggles with “infinite knowledge and zero wisdom.”

“How would an incredibly precocious child who remembered everything he thought because computers never forget anything feel when he started talking?” Houser says.

It feels like A Better Heaven is predicting the future.

The book, first published as a podcast, comes at a time when the continued rise of artificial intelligence means the industry’s seven biggest companies are collectively worth more than the Chinese economy.

But Houser says he started writing his book “one good year” before OpenAI’s ChatGPT launches to the masses in 2022, complete with a logo that looks eerily similar to his fictional creation.

Instead, it was humanity’s technological dependence during Covid – on a scale he had underestimated – that inspired his thinking.

In his novel, which sometimes feels monologue-heavy, Houser envisions a hyper-digital, alienating world where people are drawn away from deepening political problems into the spiral of social media and productive artificial intelligence.

Enter Mark, CEO of Tyburn Industria, who dreamed of building Ark, an immersive gaming experience that users could enter to reconnect with themselves. It creates a world and mission tailored to each player’s deepest desires and needs.

However, during testing, the Ark becomes a Pandora’s box of addictions. Some players find joy; others encounter terrorism. One even reconnects with his dead sister.

Meanwhile, a rogue AI robot named NigelDave has infiltrated the real world, controlling minds and engineering realities that no one else can control.

Released for advertising purposes, people wonder if their thoughts are real. Everything is monitored and nothing is safe. As climate emergencies intensify, society is falling into the grip of civil war.

The only way to escape is to “drift”; This means hiding from thousands of algorithms by living off the grid, constantly moving, and suppressing the maddening paranoia that your thoughts are not your own.

To the reader, NigelDave sounds like a nightmare in which ChatGPT has gone wrong.

The AI ​​tool recently hit 800 million weekly active users, according to boss Sam Altman, and Houser believes some people have become addicted to the technology’s affirming “human overlay.”

Microsoft’s Head of Artificial Intelligence, Mustafa Süleyman, warned about the increase AI psychosis – a non-clinical term describing events where people increasingly rely on chatbots like Claude, Grok and ChatGPT, convinced that something imaginary has become reality.

In some cases, the chatbot fuels grandiose fantasies about future opportunities. In others it is presented in a romantic connection. Even more worrying are reports from parents says bots encourage children to kill themselves.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI in response to increased scrutiny recently tightened welfare protocolsWith updates designed to enable the chatbot to respond “safely and empathetically to signs of potential delusion or madness.”

The dizzying algorithm-powered society into which NigelDave has been unleashed is also similar to ours.

Parents worry about exposing their children to misinformation or harmful content. Last year national police chiefs said: ‘Pretty scary’ misogynistic radicalization from boys and young men. And on Facebook in 2014 admitted to being manipulated They are using the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users without their consent to manage the emotions they are exposed to.

“As a parent, you always worry that anything you expose your kids to will give them misinformation or bombard them with too much information,” Houser says.

But given video games’ long history of being accused of inciting youth to violence, is it brave for a video game creator to warn of these dangers?

Houser insists there is a difference.

“We always had data on violence in games, and it was very clear: As people played more video games, youth violence decreased.

“No matter what people claimed, we knew the opposite was true.”

Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and researcher of violence in games, says numerous studies have shown that “playing violent games has no significant effect on aggression.”

According to Geekout Newsletter author and social media consultant Matt Navarra, AI models and social media are another matter; a “new paradigm” for changing behaviors that gaming never threatened.

He says dismissing concerns as a GTA-style moral panic “understates what’s changed.”

“We’re talking about external systems that can potentially shape people’s beliefs or nudge attention, personalized experiences, behavior, and even influence identity and emotional states.”

Could Houser move forward with A Better Heaven at Rockstar? “I don’t know if I had the bandwidth to think about it,” he tells me.

HE has been explained before Fatigue from managing large open-world sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption and GTA played a role in his departure.

The aim of his book was to create “something truly different in this age of wildly saturated media.”

So where next? He is already writing the second part of the series and plans are underway to develop a video game whose visuals he promises will be groundbreaking.

An important message, he says, is to not let your device or AI “tell you what to think.” Otherwise, Houser says, “you’re giving up control of your phone.”

As the creator of worlds, his greatest fear is losing his imagination due to the endless flood of algorithms. Sometimes, after hours of scrolling, he realizes: “I haven’t had any ideas all day.”

“If you go offline for a while, sometimes if I go for a walk without my phone, you start to get ideas.

“A person is better off not thinking,” he says. “Thinking is a privilege.”