Electronic Arts is among the numerous game developers who are embracing AI in their development processes, and now CEO Andrew Wilson has commented further on the controversial topic.
Speaking at the iicon event in Las Vegas this week, as reported by Game File, Wilson said he recently saw some internal EA data that said about 85% of the company’s quality-assurance work is being done today alongside “some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm.”
This has not led to lower employment at EA for QA work, he said. “We hire more QA people than we ever have,” he said. The executive went on to say that EA’s QA teams are using AI for “the simple stuff.” Related to this, he said EA has needed to hire more QA workers to check the work, which sounds odd, though we do not know the specifics of the situation. This follows on from a Harvard Business Review report that said early findings suggest that AI doesn’t reduce work, it intensifies it.
Before this, Wilson said advancements to AI will inevitably lead to job losses in the short term but will ultimately lead to net gains in employment in the long run, as was the case with other historical labor shifts. It’s still early days for this prediction.
Also during the interview, Wilson, like Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick before him, said people are overestimating what AI can do.
“Do I think that a 16-year-old in a garage is going to create a Battlefield or an EA Sports FC or a Sims or a Call of Duty or a GTA? I actually don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” he said.
As an example, Wilson said when YouTube launched, one school of thought was that people like acclaimed film director Steven Spielberg would be out of a job, while others thought YouTube would be full of cat videos and people would quickly lose interest. Neither of those things happened. Spielberg is still making big movies and YouTube led to the creation of hugely popular creators like Mr. Beast and iShowSpeed. “They coexist. And both have grown dramatically,” Wilson said.
Wilson said user-generated content powered by AI tools can be a “really positive and really important” thing for the gaming industry. “But I don’t think it is going to destroy the existing industry,” he said.
One of Google’s latest AI tools, Project Genie, was released earlier this year and it claims it can create worlds “generated in real time.” People quickly put it to use to create rip-offs of Mario and Fortnite, among many others, and the buzz around Genie triggered a massive sell-off in gaming stocks like Take-Two, Unity, and Roblox, with the prevailing theory that game developers and the creators of game engines are in trouble if anyone, anywhere can make a game by prompting an AI tool.
But that’s silly thinking, experts said, pointing out that this was just the latest example of Wall Street losing the plot and failing to understand how things actually work.
EA is in the process of being acquired by an investor consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to the tune of $55 billion. The deal is structured as a leveraged buyout–the largest deal of that type in the history of business across any industry–and many are expecting massive cuts to come to service that debt.
In other AI news in gaming, The Witcher 3’s director said his team’s new game, The Blood of Dawnwalker, used generative AI early in development and said other studios would be wise to do this as well.
