EA’s AI Tools Reportedly Cost Game Devs Time Even After a Year of Use

Electronic Arts, the gaming giant behind games like The Sims, Apex Legends, and the Battlefield franchise, today announced a new partnership with Stability AI that it claims will help artists more quickly iterate and develop games more efficiently. However, according to a recent report by Business Insider, EA has been pushing its employees across the board to use AI for at least a year. Sources who spoke to Business Insider revealed that, despite what EA says about any AI tools it plans to develop with Stability AI in the future, the current in-house AI tools have caused more hassle than anything else. EA employees familiar with the AI tools say that the AI tools often hallucinate, to the point that developers have to go in and manually fix code that the AI tools generated.

Artists also took issue with the fact that their art was being used to train these AI models, which would theoretically devalue their work and result in reduced demand for artists. There are also reports that around 100 employees were recently terminated from the QA department because the AI could easily review and summarize tester feedback. Despite these complaints, EA is leaning into AI more heavily than ever with the aforementioned Stability AI partnership. News also just broke that Krafton, the publisher behind PUBG and the Subnautica franchise, has announced that it will be pivoting to become an AI-first company. Specifically, Krafton will be spending $70 million on GPU horsepower to power an increased reliance on agentic AI for automation and efficiency. Towards the end of September, it was revealed that EA’s new owners—a group of investors—would be leaning on AI in order to “significantly cut operating costs,” which has clearly already started to materialize.