'I wanted to write about games and tech in a way that felt authentic' Dan Houser. 'I wanted to write about games and tech in a way that felt authentic' Dan Houser. He wrote the world's most successful video games - now what? He rewrote the rule book with Rockstar then left it all behind. T here are only a handful of video game makers who have had as profound an effect on the industry as Dan Houser.

He created Grand Theft Auto. Dan Houser was one of the masterminds behind revolutionary video game series Grand Theft Auto. Now, after leaving Rockstar Games and launching his own company, he's released a debut novel about a very different type of game. A Better Paradise is a dystopian vision of the near future in which an AI-led computer game goes rogue. Set in a polarised world, it finds Mark Tyburn attempting to create a virtual haven for people to find sanctuary and reconnect within themselves against an all-consuming social media hellscape.

A Florida Christian school teacher was arrested this week after allegedly creating child sexual abuse materials using photos from the school yearbook and artificial intelligence (AI), according to authorities. The Pasco County Sheriff'sOffice said 67-year-old Steven Houser of New Port Richey faces charges for possession of child pornography. Deputies initiated an investigation after receiving an unspecified tip about Houser. Steven Guy Houser, a third-grade science teacher at a Christian school in New Port Richey, Florida, was allegedly found to be in possession of child pornography he created using yearbook photos and artificial intelligence. The investigation discovered that Beacon, a third-grade science teacher at Beacon Christian Academy, allegedly possessed two photos and three videos depicting child pornography.

They can only dream of what it's like to burst onto the field in The Big Show on Opening Day, but Purdue University outfielders Cam Thompson and Curtis Washington Jr. are among thousands of college baseball players with access to more data-juiced tech than ever to use in the hopes of getting to the majors. One of the tools their team has tested tracks and visualizes every joint in their bodies to measure and analyze their dynamic movements, helping them become a split-second faster on the base paths or gain an edge on runners when they throw home. "I was the slowest on the team," said Thompson in a video describing Purdue's use of 3D Athlete Tracking, or 3DAT, technology developed by Intel, which captures video footage and applies computer vision and deep learning to digitize an individual player's skeletal data and calculate biomechanics. The data and analytical insights gave Thompson and his coaches information revealing that he was bent over just slightly when launching himself from a base. "To the eye, you might not see this, but those first four or five steps were actually slowing him down," said John Madia, director of Baseball Player Development at Purdue.

It's a comment I've seen hundreds of times, or variations of throughout my time here at Kotaku: internet complaints about the quality of reviews. "A bot can do better than this," some would cry. So let's put that to the test. I've run this test before, although last time I fed Kotaku Australia comments into the machine learning model. That was run using a free online version of the GPT-2 language model, although the more powerful GPT-3 model is available now if you're willing to pay to access the API. So I did that, specifically through a tool called Shortly. We got some fun responses last time the AI pretended to double as a commenter.

Four days before the debut of Red Dead Redemption 2, arguably the most high-profile video game launch of the year, the non-profit organization Take This sent out an email to its supporters and the media. "Crunch is yet again a hot topic in the gaming news," it began. "With the recent stories about crunch development there has been a renewed interest in Take This' 2016 white paper on crunch and many organizations have come to us for comment on the topic." That white paper is one of the only academic examinations of video game crunch -- what it's called when developers work significantly more than 40 hours a week to complete a project on time. It's a pervasive, divisive factor in the industry and one of the top rallying cries for those who want to unionize game development in the United States.