From Gaming Guru to Novelist: A Thoughts-Hijacking AI Journey

Dan Houser was one of many masterminds behind revolutionary online game collection Grand Theft Auto.

Now, after leaving Rockstar Video games and launching his personal firm, he is launched a debut novel a couple of very totally different sort of sport.

A Higher Paradise is a dystopian imaginative and prescient of the close to future through which an AI-led pc sport goes rogue.

Set in a polarised world, it finds Mark Tyburn trying to create a digital haven for folks to search out sanctuary and reconnect inside themselves towards an all-consuming social media hellscape.

Nevertheless it all goes improper when it finally ends up unleashing a mysterious, sentient AI bot named NigelDave into society – “a hyper-intelligence constructed by people” – flaws included.

Readers get to see his thought processes as he struggles with “infinite information and nil knowledge”.

“What would an extremely precocious little one, who remembers all the things he ever thought – as a result of computer systems remember issues – really feel like when he began speaking?” Houser says.

It feels a bit like A Higher Paradise predicted the longer term.

First launched as a podcast, the e-book comes as AI’s continued growth means the sector’s huge seven corporations are actually collectively value greater than China’s economic system.

However Houser says he started writing the e-book “a superb 12 months” earlier than OpenAI’s ChatGPT went dwell to the lots in 2022, full with a emblem eerily just like his fictional creation.

As an alternative, it was humanity’s technological dependency throughout Covid – at a scale he’d underestimated – that impressed his pondering.

In his novel – which typically feels monologue-heavy – Houser envisions a hyper-digital, alienating world the place folks retreat from deepening political issues right into a spiral of social media and generative AI.

Enter CEO of Tyburn Industria, Mark, who desires of constructing the Ark, an immersive gaming expertise customers can enter in an effort to reconnect with themselves. It generates a world and mission tailor-made to every participant’s innermost desires and desires.

However throughout testing, the Ark turns into a Pandora’s field of habit. Some gamers discover pleasure; others encounter terror. One even reconnects along with his useless sister.

In the meantime, a rogue AI bot named NigelDave slips into the actual world, controlling minds and engineering realities nobody can management.

Mined for promoting, individuals are left questioning if their ideas are real. Every little thing is tracked, and nothing is safe. As local weather emergencies intensify, society falls to pockets of civil struggle.

The one method to escape is to “drift”- which implies hiding from a thousand algorithms by residing off-grid, continually transferring and suppressing maddening paranoia that your ideas are usually not your personal.

To the reader, NigelDave appears like a nightmare ChatGPT gone improper.

The AI device lately reached 800 million weekly energetic customers, in accordance with boss Sam Altman, and Houser believes some individuals are turning into depending on the expertise’s affirming “human veneer”.

Microsoft’s head of AI Mustafa Suleyman has warned of an increase in AI psychosis – a non-clinical time period describing incidents the place folks more and more depend on chatbots like Claude, Grok and ChatGPT and change into satisfied that one thing imaginary has change into actual.

In some circumstances, the chatbot fuels grandiose fantasies about future alternatives. In others, it presents in a romantic connection. Extra troubling are studies of fogeys saying bots have inspired their kids to kill themselves.

In response to the elevated scrutiny, ChatGPT creator OpenAI lately tightened its welfare protocols, with updates designed to make sure its chatbot responds “safely and empathetically to potential indicators of delusion or mania”.

The dizzying algorithm-fuelled society through which NigelDave is unleashed mirrors ours too.

Dad and mom fear about exposing their kids to false info or dangerous content material. Final 12 months nationwide police chiefs described the “fairly terrifying” misogynistic radicalisation of boys and younger males. And in 2014 Fb admitted manipulating the information feeds of practically 700,000 customers with out their consent to handle the feelings they have been uncovered to.

“As a mum or dad, you at all times fear about something that you just expose your youngsters to that’s going to both give them false info or just bombard them with an excessive amount of info,” Houser says.

However is it daring for a online game creator to be warning of those risks – given the lengthy historical past of video video games themselves being accused of constructing younger folks violent?

Houser insists there is a distinction.

“We at all times had the information about sport violence, and it was very clear: as folks performed extra video video games, youth violence went down.

“No matter folks have been claiming, we knew the other was true.”

Psychology professor and sport violence researcher Pete Etchells says quite a few research have proven “no significant impact of enjoying violent video games on aggression”.

AI fashions and social media are one other matter – a “new paradigm” in altering behaviour that gaming by no means threatened, in accordance with Matt Navarra, social media advisor and writer of the Geekout Publication.

He says dismissing issues as a GTA-style ethical panic “understates what’s altering”.

“We’re speaking about exterior techniques that may probably form folks’s beliefs or manipulate consideration, personalised experiences, nudge behaviour and even affect identification and emotional states.”

May Houser have pushed ahead with A Higher Paradise at Rockstar? “I do not know if I’d have had the bandwidth to consider it,” he tells me.

He is beforehand described the fatigue of managing huge open-world sandbox video games like Pink Lifeless Redemption and GTA as enjoying a task in his departure.

The objective along with his e-book was to create “one thing actually totally different on this period of loopy media saturation”.

So the place subsequent? He is already writing the second instalment of the collection, and plans are beneath method to develop a online game, for which he guarantees the visuals are ground-breaking.

A key message, he says, is to not let your gadget – or AI – “let you know what to suppose”. In any other case, Houser argues, “you are giving up management to your cellphone”.

His largest worry, as creator of worlds, is shedding creativeness due to the countless torrent of algorithms. Typically after scrolling for hours, he realises: “I’ve not had an concept all day”.

“In case you go offline for a bit – typically I make myself go for a stroll with no cellphone, you begin to have concepts.

“A human is healthier pondering than not,” he says. “Considering is a privilege.”