EA's going all in on AI for video game design

Game design looks set to the be nest frontier for generative AI. We've already seen Google researchers make an AI Doom recreation, and Tencent recently revealed initial researching into what could become an open-world game generator. Now Electronic Arts (EA), the video game giant behind Battlefield, The Sims and FIFA, has confirmed what we already suspected: it's going all in on generative AI.

At EA's Investors Day, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson said AI has always been part of the company's creative journey. The company now has “over 100 active novel AI projects” underway as it aims to "accelerate how innovators and creators are building entertainment experiences leading to self-expression, content creation, curation, and instant gratification."

Electronic Arts - Investor Day 2024 - YouTube

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Andrew said EA's AI work is focusing on three strategic areas: efficiency, expansion, and transformation. The first of those means doing things faster, and at a higher quality through more iteration and more testing, and, of course, more cheaply. Meanwhile, expansion, means giving developers an “exponentially bigger canvas upon which they can create and richer colors to paint more brilliant worlds” with deeper characters and "stories that are more personal and nuanced.”

Finally, the area of transformation involves investigating potential new ways to play and watch games and to create user-generated content in ways that haven't so far been envisioned. Chief Strategy Officer Mihir Vaidya talked about experiments in what EA sees as a huge space of opportunity between user-generated experiences (UGX) and imagination to game, an area that the company is calling 'imagination to creation'. That appears to include open sandboxes where players can create and modify games instantaneously using natural language through an AI model based on EA's own proprietary dataset.

"We all remember playing against the AI, and it has evolved in today’s innovations in generative AI," Andrew told investors. "This remarkable technology is not merely a buzzword for us. It’s the very core of our business."

EA also announced new AI-powered features for The Sims 4, including a visual search for content uploaded to the Gallery and the ability to generate Create-A-Sim outfits based on provided images. The news received mixed reactions among fans, with some claiming that it would take the fun out of the game.