As conversations around the increasing prevalence of controversial generative AI tools in game development continue, EA’s president of enterprise development Laura Miele has said she believes the tech has led to a “real rise in creativity” among the publisher’s studios.
Miele was speaking at Game Business Live, attended by Eurogamer, during this year’s Summer Game Fest, and replying to host Christopher Dring’s question, “Will the rise of AI tools lead to shorter development cycles?”. Miele – who served as president of EA Entertainment prior to her promotion earlier this month – responded, “Perhaps in some parts they will. I really believe in what I’ve seen, that I’m pretty excited about.”
“I’ve always wanted to… help our studio developers remove friction, and I’ve always kind of wanted to be a hero to them and help them create career-defining experiences,” Miele continued. “And I think that AI, what I’ve seen, how AI has enabled removing friction from our pipelines and our tools and our workflows, has been pretty exciting.
“It’s removed some tedium out of their jobs – and I’ve seen faster prototyping, I’ve seen faster creativity, and shorter, faster conversations around creativity and coming to alignment. And so… I think it’s super interesting. I think there’s a real rise of creativity that comes from removing some of the tedious tasks about development.”
Miele’s positive comments follow a report by Business Insider last October claiming EA leadership had spent the year “urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for just about everything”, from the creation of code and concept art to managerial work, including “scripting conversations with direct reports about sensitive topics such as pay and promotions”.
That’s perhaps no surprise, given EA CEO Andrew Wilson insisted in 2023 that AI is “the very core of our business”, revealing the company had over 100 “active novel AI projects” to assist with game development. According to Business Insider, however, EA’s push had caused discontent among employees. Some were worried about their jobs after being asked to train AI tools on their own work, while others claimed EA’s in-house chatbot ReefGPT produced flawed code and other “hallucinations” that needed correcting.
Generative AI tools remain hugely controversial of course, given the substantial ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the technology. And that’s without factoring in the dramatic impact AI is having on the consumer hardware industry, as tech giants’ rush to build new AI datacentres sends RAM and storage prices – and the cost of hardware that requires them – soaring. Even so, gen-AI use continues to proliferate across the games industry.
Many major publishers are embracing the technology. PlayStation recently announced a raft of AI initiatives, for instance, including plans to “improve productivity [across its studios] through the use of AI powered tools”. Capcom, too, recently revealed it was “seeing a certain degree of effectiveness from the use of generative AI”. And Epic last week announced its new Unreal Engine 6 will feature major support for the technology.
Epic boss Tim Sweeney has long been bullish about generative AI, of course, and last year dismissed AI disclosure initiatives launched by the likes of Valve on Steam as unnecessary, reasoning the technology “will be involved in nearly all future production”. And he might have a point – more than a thousand games in Steam’s latest Next Fest feature a generative AI disclosure of some kind.
Amid all this publisher Take-Two’s former AI boss Dr Luke Dicken – whose division was responsible for researching and exploring the way various forms of AI could help game development – recently spoke out about generative AI, saying it is “poisoning the well” for AI as a whole. “Some of the excesses of gen-AI are so egregious that you need to make sure you’re able to push back,” he said.
