EA's experimental AI tech could change gaming forever

Today, EA demoed its ambitious new experimental AI technology to investors, showing off ideas that could change gaming forever.

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During its Investor's Day stream, live service publisher Electronic Arts outlined specific ideas on how to best use generative AI to transform gaming experiences. In one of the AI concepts, dubbed "Imagination to Creation," EA Chief Strategy Officer Mihi Vaidya showed off a video where two gamers used a ChatGPT-like prompt to quickly create an in-game map, mode, and characters--all using EA's first-party asset library. The publisher is mining decades of game files from titles like Battlefield and Apex Legends to help fuel its vision for AI-powered User-Generated Experiences (UGX).

The chat prompt is just an experimental concept, and Vadiya was careful to say that its UGX tools "aren't meant to replace AAA games." EA instead wants to use its Imagination to Creation vision to supplement AAA gaming with a new line of engagement and monetization. "We believe AI is the next great opportunity to unlock new levels of value long-term," EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in the stream.

Below we have a quick transcript of what Vaidya said during the stream. His words highlight what could very well be the future of gaming in the next 5 or so years, especially given EA's heavy emphasis on live services and microtransaction-driven economies; UGC, or UGX, is powered by the kind of Roblox-like economy where users will be able to purchase in-game skins and the like, or potentially wrapped in an EA-branded subscription service.

"What you saw was a demonstration of two friends jumping into an open sandbox, and then creating a new world made of boxes, in real time, without any coding expertise, in a matter of seconds.

They then quickly shifted to remixing existing elements from their favorite EA games' asset libraries, databases, and communities--elements like characters, weapons, gameplay systems, and logic.

Even here, the incredible thing is that they were able to do this instantaneously using nothing more than natural language.

This remixing of foundational elements would not be possible without EA's massive proprietary dataset which includes hundreds of thousands of high-quality 3D assets, millions of lines of code, billions of gameplay hours, and trillions of telemetry events.

This is all invaluable data as we think about the training of our own custom creation models.

And our dataset grows by the minute as we're a digital live services company with millions of daily touchpoints with our communities.

Once the players that you saw were happy with their initial creations, they started to play, and they were able to rapidly iterate on the fun as they went along. Ultimately, by the end, they created a social game experience, one that started with our AAA content as a foundation, but that quickly took on a life of its own, on the foundation that we built.

Over time you can imagine these same players, and others like them, continuing to build in, around, and beyond EA's foundations. Maybe even creating experiences that become the basis of entirely new chart-topping IPs.

This would represent a new level of symbiotic relationship between our own developers and UGX creators, and one with our own IPs being launch pads for new experiences and businesses."