Electronic Arts' AI Tools Are Creating More Work Than They Save (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0179883136
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/10/27/1316249/electronic-arts-ai-tools-are-creating-more-work-than-they-save
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-ai-divide-roiling-video-game-giant-electronic-arts-2025-10
The tools produce flawed code and hallucinations that employees then spend time correcting. Staff say the AI [1]creates more work rather than less , according to Business Insider. They fix mistakes while simultaneously training the programs on their own work. Creative employees fear the technology will eventually eliminate demand for character artists and level designers. One recently laid-off senior quality-assurance designer says AI performed a key part of his job -- reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers. He suspects this contributed to his termination when about 100 colleagues were let go this past spring from the company's Respawn Entertainment studio.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-ai-divide-roiling-video-game-giant-electronic-arts-2025-10
Such a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The same thing happens for code generation: [1]https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.090... [arxiv.org]
Devs think they are about 20% faster, when in reality, they are about 20% slower. Decreased code quality and added vulnerabilities are not counted in that.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089
HR Googler - Spoof a Single Point Of Failure (SPOF (Score:1)
I love reading book reports. They're so unique and personal. How often they emphasize our individuality. Unpretty. But domain and domestication are not the same... Or are they? Now spin the painting 180-degrees and see the true image: FLOPS.
The "must" gives the game away (Score:5, Interesting)
These are artists and programmers, you hired them for their skills so let them use them. If you have AI tools cool, let them integrate them into their workflow as they see fit but as soon as you start dictating to people how they should do their work you're already off the path. Your job as the employer should be defining achievable goals and so long as they are meeting those why do you care so much how they got there? Very sus.
Re:The "must" gives the game away (Score:4, Funny)
You mean managers actually managing? What dimension are you from?
Re: (Score:2)
Investors believe controlling managers assure their financial return. Managers believe micro-control assures their job security. Coders believe they control ai. Ai believes / learns / achieves ... nothing, but the next-digit in a multiply-knotted numeric string.
senior quality-assurance designer? (Score:2)
These are the types of jobs LLMs SHOULD come for.
Re: (Score:2)
At 50% accuracy it's a perfect fit. However, to game the system and have some old skool fun, flip a coin instead, like they have for millenia already.
Finally something good! (Score:2)
No AI-induced job market annihilation, at least until the AI bubble collapse...
Which is it? (Score:2)
Does it make more work than it saves, or will it replace character artists and level designers?
Re: Which is it? (Score:3)
Noticed that, huh? "It creates more work! Also, I got laid off because my job was specifically the one thing it's really good at, summarization!"
Re: (Score:3)
these assertions are not mutually exclusive. every new technology reshapes the industry and the job market, introducing new skill sets and obsoleting others. this transition takes time, though, and we're currently in a very chaotic and confusing moment of it.
i found this statement in tfa a bit comical:
> One study of 7,000 professionals, (...) found that 87% of executives use AI daily, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees.
if that is an accurate measure (no idea), it would tell more about that confusion than about the actual transition.
Re: (Score:3)
I'd say that AI is not improving 90% of employees lives, or productivity, and the only reason the "C suite" and "Managers" are seeing improvements is because their jobs largely consist of rubber stamping and bullshitting.
the modern AI *is* a PHB. (Score:4, Interesting)
>> One study of 7,000 professionals, (...) found that 87% of executives use AI daily, compared with 57% of managers and 27% of employees.
> if that is an accurate measure (no idea), it would tell more about that confusion than about the actual transition.
Makes sense. Executive work consists almost entirely of:
-reading reports.
-looking at charts.
-processing reports and charts and then making a choice based on clearly-stated criteria.
-going to meetings with other executives where you all discuss the choices you make (based on your direct-reports' reports).
-announcing the choices you made to employees and external PR outlets.
That's basically a list of LLM strengths in a nutshell.
C-suite folks are the reason AI hype will continue to build. It's because C-suite folks are already and always have been human LLMs. C-suite folks have always interacted with other people the way LLMs do. Think about it, their entire job consists of processing information just enough to issue a choice/announcement . They don't need to (and typically do not bother to) understand the issues on a deep, personal experience level -- that's a job for the underlings. Underlings are the human beings who have actual years of experiential true understanding . The underlings use their experience to write up their reports and collate the data to generate the charts that represent their understanding, then mouth-feed it to the little chirruping execs like a mama bird. Execs take all the pre-digested understanding, pick one or two token points that seem most important to their overall goals, and render a conclusion. Sound familiar?
That's why C-suite folks love AI and see it as the undeniable coolest best biggest yugest future. It feels warm and familiar to them. It does work and talks to them the exact same way they do work and the exact same way all their C-suite cadre talks. They will even be highly puzzled that the rest of their employees don't love AI, because the C-suite folks don't actually understand what their direct reports DO. And that's by organizational division-of-labor design. But that division makes everyone blind to experiences outside their own.
An LLM is merely a PHB that's been programmed to be nice to people. (at least so far)
Re: (Score:2)
They're training their replacement. Eventually the slop will be good enough for a handful of janitors to clean up and package.
Re: (Score:2)
Both. Who will be there when their latest AI design goes down worse than concorde? Less work now is multiplied tenfold down the line.
Re: (Score:2)
So the places it's going to replace workers are the people who tweak the fuck out of textures and models to improve performance.
A good example of fucking that up is starfield. For some god-awful reason starfield modeled all the greeble in the game as polygonal objects instead of just using bump mapping like we've been doing for the last 30 years.
I suspect this was because it made the lighting engine easier especially if you have Ray tracing effects.
But it absolutely killed performance.
Border
Both can be true (Score:2)
Management doesn't care about "rework" as a KPI. They only see that their trillion dollar slop generator completed a checklist item and fired the human that used to also let absolute garbage code out in the world. However, now that the perfect computer god is responsible for the failures, and a computer can never be held responsible, EA can't be held responsible. Everybody wins... well, I mean, company management and shareholders, but those are the only real people. Everyone else is just a useless mouth to
Re: (Score:2)
It'll make characters and levels that are deemed 'good enough' and shipped as slop. That it takes a Geforce 7090 to render a NES-era Mario sprite isn't the company's problem.
Re: (Score:2)
[sarcasm] The solution is easy: Just have another AI fix the mistakes of the existing AI. Then use another AI to fix the fixes of the second AI. Where is my executive level bonus for implementing this? It should be at least 7 figures.[/sarcasm]
Re: Which is it? (Score:2)
It's actually a decent description of how agents work. Generate something, analyze, test, refine, iterate until satisfactory results or give up limit.
Re: (Score:3)
> Does it make more work than it saves, or will it replace character artists and level designers?
The problem with your question is it is binary. Both situation could occur as AI creates more work for the people that EA did not lay off because EA thinks they could reduce staff that they could not. Remember EA specifically is being bought out in a leveraged buyout. The new owners may only care about the quarterly savings they get when they continuously reduce staff as they sell EA assets piece by piece.
Re: (Score:1)
It will it replace character artists and level designers, but not as quickly as they want. In the mean time it's a net drag on the company as they learn and adjust.
Peoples opinions of AI are becoming polarized to the detriment of us all. Either it's going to be the apocalypse and also be completely useless and also take over everyone's jobs or it's going to create utopia and leave everyone fully employed.