With EA now on the hook for $20 billion in the wake of its Saudi-and-Kushner-funded buyout, both the company and its new owners have been pretty obvious about their ambitions for AI-driven development to, somehow, miraculously help it start printing money quickly.
Which is concerning. Also concerning: One of EA's biggest releases this year hits in just a few hours in the form of Battlefield 6. Is it going to give us our first taste of the AI future?
You can breathe for now. In a chat with the BBC, EA VP general manager of Dice and Criterion promises that you won't run into anything made by GenAI in BF6. Phew. Time to take a big swig of coffee and see what else Coutaz has to say about the tech.
Uh oh! Turns out it doesn't stop there. Although you won't see GenAI-made content in BF6, Coutaz does say the tech is used in prep stages of development "to allow more time and more space to be creative".
It's not just you, I'm not sure what the substance of that statement is either, though Coutaz does say there's not really a way to integrate the tech into devs' day-to-day just yet (it's perhaps interesting to note, here, a recent bit of research by the FT which found that many businesses had crammed AI into their work but couldn't actually define what it was doing for them).
In the tones of one being coaxed by Lucifer to commit a heinous crime, Coutaz says AI is "very seducing" and that "if we can break the magic with AI, it will help us be more innovative and more creative". That is, you might note, a repeated refrain with a lot of execs bedazzled by AI—that it won't substitute for human creativity but will, in fact, give it greater space to flourish.
Frankly, I don't see how that could be the case. To quickly gin up placeholder text and textures? That's why the good Lord gave us lorem ipsum (or if you're a poor, benighted journalist, good old 'TKTKTK'). To generate ideas for creatives to run with? I'd much rather those come from writers' rooms and brainstorming sessions than emerge—as Frankenstein patchworks of old ideas—from mammoth data centres.
But with EA staring down the barrel of a $20 billion debt black hole, it's no wonder the studio is desperately hoping AI can do something, anything for it. I'm sceptical it will. But for now, I'm just glad I won't run into AI-generated textures in the battlefields of Battlefield.
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