Dread it, run from it, it seems that AI is truly inevitable in the gaming industry. Even if it won't be generating games at the press of a button, it seems that a lot of companies are adopting the technology in some capacity, and seeing how it can help workflow. The immediate worry, of course, is that AI will start taking people's jobs. EA CEO Andrew Wilson doesn't have that worry.
At iicon, a conference for video game executives organised by the people who once ran E3, Wilson was asked about how AI is used at EA (via GameFile). Wilson said that even if AI is doing a lot of work right now, they're still hiring more people.
"I saw some data recently, I think, now almost all—like 85%—of our quality assurance [work] is done with some kind of machine learning or AI-driven algorithm. Yet as a company, we hire more QA people than we ever have," Wilson said. When asked what kind of work the AI does, Wilson responded by saying it seems only able to handle rudimentary work at the moment. It can handle "the simple stuff: turn the box on, turn the box off, boot it up, shut it down, does it crash, all these things."
Wilson claims that right now, EA's implementation of AI has been "entirely augmentation." It might make people a bit more comfortable to have tech working alongside them, but get too comfortable and in today's industry, you may end up as part of the new layoffs statistic. It's hard to imagine this AI situation not developing towards replacement, but Wilson doesn't seem too concerned right now.