Nothing could be more on the nose than this, but a new mod for "Fallout: New Vegas" replaces the in-game character "Mr. House" with the real-world character "Elon Musk," first spotted by Kotaku Created by NoUsernameSelected, the Elon House mod takes its cue from the existing New Vegas mod, which used the same trick with Mark Zuckerberg in 2020. The New Vegas mask was created by AI.

In the game, Mr. House runs one of New Vegas' main strongholds, The Strip, and can be your friend or foe depending on your actions. House is presented as a technological visionary and, in a sense, one of humanity's hopes, but unfortunately, he believes his own hype so much that he decides that the rebuilt civilization must exist at his sole discretion. Also, all communication with him is done through a screen.

It is clear that the creators of this mod have found some similarities with the mask, as Eron House has replaced the AI-generated likeness of the mask and all of House's voice acting has been replaced with the edited AI voice of the mask. The mod uses ElevenLabs text-to-speech software, Whisper voice recognition software, and Stable Diffusion image generation software.

Musk's likeness is in keeping with New Vegas' aesthetic, and the voice lines can be heard in the video, which is intentionally a bit robotic; NoUsernameSelected added this effect on top of the AI voice, oddly enough, because the original result was " crystal clear" but also because they thought it was too "realistic" and oddly in tune with the rest of the game's audio.

"I had already had a picture of Eron after messing around with Stable Diffusion a few weeks ago," NoUsernameSelected told Kotaku. 'Then it was basically just a matter of opening the game's voice line, transcribing it with OpenAI Whisper, vocalizing it in Elevenlabs with Eron's AI voice, and figuring out how to bring it back into the game.' The overall API and subscription cost was only a few dollars to transcribe and voice 600 lines. With the right know-how, this type of content is actually surprisingly easy to create."

How easy: The mods had used most of the tools before and obviously had the images ready, but the task of recreating the audio and putting it all together took only "less than 24 hours from start to finish."

If you're feeling a little uneasy about this, it's probably not just the mask. This is certainly a novel kind of mod, but everything it tried to do was accomplished with excellent production values, and the mod makers, who are basically self-taught, have managed to achieve a thematically appropriate and successful representation of public figures in the game. I don't need to have an opinion on whether this is good or bad; I think it's quite remarkable.