EA will use generative AI to completely transform user-generated content

Electronic Arts will use generative AI to completely transform user-generated content and significantly reduce friction in this billion-dollar market.

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UGC, or user-generated content, is incredibly popular in gaming--these are the kinds of in-game creations that power Roblox's billion-dollar economy. Major live service publishers want in on the action, and today at its investor's day stream, EA demonstrated a generative AI concept where users can interact with a ChatGPT-like prompt to create in-game levels, designs, and characters.

EA is calling this "Imagination to Creation," and the tools are powered by generative AI that has mined the publisher's resources, games, and content. Rather than UGC, though, EA refers to this as UGX, or User-Generated eXperiences. In the experimental concept, gamers could choose official EA-franchised character models alongside community-created weapons. Parameters like combat options/game modes were also instantly generated via the ChatGPT-like prompt. Once generated, users could drop right into the map and start playing against each other with the set parameters, character designs, etc.

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But things didn't stop once the game was active. The concept showed that creators could change rules on-the-fly, even changing the world state while in-game.

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Here's what EA Chief Strategy Officer Mihi Vaidya is careful to say that the generative AI experiments are "not intended to replace AAA games, but instead unlock new and adjacent categories that add, as opposed to take away, from the existing gaming market."

Vaidya goes on to discuss the Imagination to Creation vision:

"For the future where games may be generated as opposed to rendered, this hard work of simultaneous processing will evolve into the much harder work into simultaneous prediction.

"Of course, despite these generous layers of complexity, it doesn't mean that generative AI can't improve some of the pieces of this complex puzzle. And while these pieces may not yet add up to a modern AAA game, we think they can enable profound new experiences in their own right, including user-generated experiences, or UGX.

"In fact, we believe that there are massive opportunities in this space that sits between today's UGX paradigm and imagination to game. We call this space Imagination to Creation."