Grand Theft Auto creator’s novel has predicted the dangers of AI
The co-creator of the legendary video game Grand Theft Auto has released a novel that comes with a stark warning about what artificial intelligence (AI) can do to humanity.
Dan Houser’s novel A Better Paradise: Volume One (An Aftermath), released in October 2025, is a continuation of his audio fiction series of the same name.
The novel tells the story of video game creator Mark Tyburn and executive Kurt Fischer, who build an ambitious but addictive video game project. However, the AI bot they built in the meantime, NigelDave, goes rogue.
Houser is the founder of video game developer and publisher Rockstar Games. He was the lead writer on over 20 video games, including the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises.
In an interview, Houser described Fischer’s character as a “pseudo messianic tech bro” who wanted to help people by creating a game that could save people from “internet pollution.” However, the AI they built has become more sentient than they had hoped.
The novel bears striking similarities with today’s reality, as a handful of tech CEOs are shaping humanity's future by pushing the technology despite mounting concerns about its impacts on the job market, the environment, and mental health, among others.
However, Houser said he started writing the book more than a year before OpenAI released ChatGPT late in 2022, a chatbot that now has approximately 800 million active users a week.
Instead, he was inspired by humanity's technological dependency during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was shut down.
Houser later admitted that he never thought he would be good at predicting the future.
“I put a lot of stuff about drones and robots thinking that was quite future-looking, and that’s actually happening already,” he said.
Today’s AI, sycophantic and hallucinating, is still incapable of wiping out humanity. However, this could change if any tech companies succeed in the race to build general artificial intelligence (AGI), which would achieve human-level cognition.
Half of AI researchers believe that if AGI is developed, there’s at least a 5% chance of extremely bad outcomes, such as human extinction, according to a 2024 survey.
At the same time, a growing number of scientists say that developing AGI is impossible, as there will never be enough computing power to replicate the human ability to observe, learn, and gain new insights.
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