LogInLike attracts like.
Have you ever heard about the Law of Attraction, a philosophical idea suggesting that one's thoughts affect one's experiences? If you have, you might remember that at the core of this belief lies the "like attracts like" principle, which proposes that similar people or people with similar thoughts, whether positive or negative, tend to be drawn to one another.
As it turns out, the principle in question seemingly applies not just to individuals but to companies, ideas, concepts, and everything else in the universe, with Electronic Arts, one of the most widely disliked game studios, announcing that they have fully embraced generative AI, a technology many associate with nothing but data scraping, image theft, and job displacement.
During its recent Investor Day 2024 presentation, several EA executives took the stage to extol the virtues of artificial intelligence, including the company's CEO, Andrew Wilson, who pinky promised that gen AI is not just a buzzword for EA, but rather lies at the very core of their business.
According to Wilson, the company currently has over 100 active AI and machine learning projects under its belt across three categories: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. When discussing "efficiency" – a term that might trigger PTSD for anyone who unexpectedly got fired because of AI – the CEO explained that for EA, efficiency means more than just cutting costs, claiming that AI would help the gaming giant handle development and business tasks faster, cheaper, and at higher quality.
"That means driving more iteration, more testing, and higher quality content for our community," Wilson said. "It means removing obstacles for our game developers, it means culturalizing content across geographies so they can focus on finding more fun for more players around the world. The lowering of these friction points leads to deeper gameplay experiences. For example, we would not have created the smash hit College Football 25 without AI, that's how 150 unique stadiums and over 11,000 player likenesses are in the game."
Electronic Arts
Following Wilson's speech, EA's President of Entertainment and Technology, Laura Miele, continued to sing the praises of the controversial technology, showcasing a few amusing early AI concepts that the studio hopes to use for game development in the future.
In one example, Miele demonstrated a somewhat realistic CG character model, which was supposedly generated by AI from a photo and rigged and animated using nothing but voice commands. In another, she pretended to give voice commands to an AI chatbot, instructing it to generate a Paris-style building and then transform it into a modern high-rise, ultimately resulting in a structure that, while fine at first glance, made little architectural sense upon closer inspection. Please note that these "AI tools" were openly described as early concepts by Electronic Arts, meaning they are still quite unfinished and might not even exist yet.
From all the AI rigamarole revealed by EA, it's impossible to say for certain whether the studio actually plans to move forward with its initiatives or if, much like the intelligence itself, it's all just artificial.
Despite the CEO's assurances that AI isn't just another buzzword they use to please investors, it's worth remembering that in 2021, the same CEO was touting NFTs and blockchain when those were all the rage – only to discreetly abandon plans to implement "collectible digital content" in EA's games when the community made it clear they hated anything blockchain-related.
Who knows, maybe the AI bubble will indeed burst soon, as some predict, whether due to economic factors or a wave of lawsuits against top AI developers, and Electronic Arts will once again quietly scrap its plans and move on to chase the next trend, continuing the perpetual cycle fueled by a lack of any original ideas. Only time can tell.
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