EA doubles down on the use of AI in its game development

In an investor day presentation, EA boss Andrew Wilson has said that AI is at the “very core of our business.”

Even as job losses continue to rock the creative industries – and videogame development in particular – EA has doubled down on its pledge to use AI in the making of its products.

The pledge came during a recent presentation for investors, in which the publishing giant’s CEO Andrew Wilson said that AI is “at the very core of our business.”

Elsewhere, as reported by Game Developer, Wilson said that his company has something in the region of one hundred “novel AI projects” in the works, all aimed at “doing what we do today faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality.”

Perhaps the most eye-catching part of the presentation, not least because it was shared on Twitter by influential games journalist Geoff Keighley, was a clip designed to show off what EA calls ‘Imagination to Creation’. In it, a pair of faceless gamers essentially create a competitive first-person combat experience by typing in prompts for a ChatGPT-style interface, which then interprets them and creates a bare-bones shooter that looks like something you could knock together in a few minutes in Unreal Engine.

Admittedly, the ability to use plain language to quickly hash together game concepts like a simple destructible environment are intriguing enough, though like so many of these AI demos – such as Sora, shown off earlier this year – it’s a little hazy when it comes to the finer details. How will the interface handle more complex commands? Where is it drawing all these assets from?

Nor do we know to what extent AI will truly change creative industries for the better, as people at the executive level claim, or whether it’ll simply hollow out ranks of already struggling artists while at the same time coming up with ideas that are simply re-synthesised versions of already existing ones. Despite the marketing hype, AI can’t imagine anything new – only take existing images, text or other concepts and mash them together into new forms.

For now, EA is clearly among the growing number of firms that has fully embraced AI. For the more sceptical among us, we probably want to see something more convincing than an endless landscape of identical cardboard boxes. “Make it more epic,” indeed.