“It’s like mad cow disease”: Rockstar Games co-founder says AI content “eating itself”

Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser gave his blunt take on artificial intelligence during a recent conversation on Virgin Radio UK. He compared the rapid spread of AI-generated content to mad cow disease, arguing that systems learning from their own output could collapse under repetition.

Houser, who helped create Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, spoke with both caution and disbelief at how quickly the tech industry embraced large-scale machine learning. He suggested that many AI evangelists lacked imagination, and his remarks echoed ongoing debates across creative industries.

Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser compares AI to "mad cow disease"

Houser said AI models scraped the internet for existing work and then used that as training data. He warned that the web might soon be filled with material created by AI itself. Consequently, he said the technology could enter a loop with diminishing originality. Houser likened that pattern to cows being fed ground-up cattle, which led to the mad cow outbreak that began in the 1980s.

"AI is gonna eventually eat itself," he said. "As far as I understand it—which is really superficial—the 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."

He also questioned the people driving AI adoption in entertainment and tech. Houser argued these leaders lacked the very traits they wanted to automate. He claimed they acted as if machines handled imagination better than people, which he dismissed as false. Additionally, he felt the push toward AI did not center artists or gamers who valued human input.

"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. So they're sort of saying, 'We're better at being human than you are.' It's obviously not true."

Social media reacts

Reactions online rolled in quickly, with some users backing Houser’s skepticism, while others focused on his imagery. For instance, @slotslv said, "AI can never be as creative as humans and make games like the GTA and Red Dead series." 

In contrast, @AGuyWhoTweet5 lamented, "It’s depressing how it’s been forced into literally EVERYTHING. Art, voices, adverts, entertainment in general, shitty google results, YouTube has abused it, Musk installing Grok, the US government using it to attack the people they serve, we‘re going BACKWARDS because of this."

Another commenter, @dmc_dmcc, praised the comparison to mad cow disease and called it an effective summary of AI recursion. Furthermore, @fullofpapaya argued, "it's not like ai actually creates new stuff. it just looks at existing art and tries to recreate it. somewhere down the line it's all going to be too similar. that's when it will end."

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