When software engineer Joshua Fonseca recently connected the GameCube simulation classic Animal Crossing to a modern AI language model like the kind that powers ChatGPT, he decided to shake things up. By programming the AI to roleplay as villagers growing aware of their debt situation, and giving them a shared memory to track conversations, Fonseca orchestrated a scenario where the residents began to organize against their raccoon landlord.
In Animal Crossing, Tom Nook runs the town shop and provides home loans (paid out in bells, the in-game currency) that keep players perpetually in debt, which is a core mechanic of the game.
"Predictably, it escalated into an anti-Tom Nook movement," Fonseca wrote in a detailed post documenting his hack that bridges a 2002 game to cloud-based AI without modifying any game code. While Fonseca frames the uprising as a type of emergent phenomenon in his post and a YouTube video, examination of the source code by AI researcher Simon Willison shows that Fonseca specifically instructed the villagers to behave this way and even escalate the unrest over time.
