> “As a company, we’ve been deeply tied to AI since our inception,”
This kind of statement is just so weird. Really? They were deeply tied to AI in the 80s? When they were launching their first games and calling devs “software artists”?
Unless they’re talking about computer players and NPCs, but… what a stretch that is. It’s like greenwashing, it’s… AI-washing. Very silly.
As a game AI developer since the 90s, I can say that lost and confused recruiters have only recently started tying me to machine learning AI, lol.
Game AI is closer to robotics (“perceive-think-actuate”) than machine learning. Always has been and continues to be. The think part is achieved by anything from a script to a state machine like behavior trees, to utility or planning networks. But it would be woefully inefficient to think with neural nets.
So the two AI are very unrelated. Neural nets are used in games only a little bit. Ubisoft had a research division where they made them play animations and drive a car in game. Epic Games built a ML deformer for character model meshes, which is faster than kinematically resolving realistic deformation (skin stretching). In mobile text based games, there was a time of experimentation a bit earlier. But game AI is much more complex in the breadth of types of calculations that it does to benefit from slow and imprecise generative AI.
Offline, yeah, game developers want to use Copilot and Dall-E to create filler content quicker, whether boilerplate code or textures for environment art like paintings, lore inspectables and decals. Also placeholder TTS has been done with generative AI for a while (like Google/Azure/Amazon TTS services). People are doing these things, minus Copilot probably, in the AAA space. Then the assets get replaced by final ones before shipping the game. This is great, it allows prototypes to be closer to final quality, which makes the game more cohesive.
But EA’s CEO… just wants to pump the stock to sell like most tech CEOs, in my humble personal opinion.
To recap: game runtime AI is AI but materially different and the overlap is probably through robotics more than directly.
This kind of statement is just so weird. Really? They were deeply tied to AI in the 80s? When they were launching their first games and calling devs “software artists”?
Unless they’re talking about computer players and NPCs, but… what a stretch that is. It’s like greenwashing, it’s… AI-washing. Very silly.