EA CTO: AI will never replace "top talent"

gamesindustry.biz:

Generative AI will be a big part of the future of game development, EA chief technology officer Marija Radulovic-Nastic believes, but maybe not at the expense of developers.

Speaking at the Collision conference in Toronto on gTuesday, Radulovic-Nastic downplayed the idea that developers should be worried about their jobs because of the tech.

"I personally believe that Gen AI will be a co-pilot to our people, and has the opportunity to scale and enhance human creativity," Radulovic-Nastic said. "But the top talent, especially top talent that we employ, will be amplified and will never be, in my mind, replaced."

Part of that optimism may be tied to the ever-increasing scope of AAA game development, as she added, "Because those large game communities have a massive appetite for consumption and creation of the content, I think we'll just be able to do more."

Radulovic-Nastic said she's seen results from experiments with generative AI that have reduced tasks that used to take six months to six weeks, with some things that took a couple weeks getting done in a couple minutes.

"Generative AI gives us the opportunity to iterate on ideas and content faster, which then drives the quality of the creative experience," she said.

While Radulovic-Nastic was clearly sold on the potential of generative AI, Radulovic-Nastic said it was important to treat it like any emerging technology, giving people thoughtful but clear guidelines on how to use it. At the moment, that's why EA is focusing its use on the ideation phase of development.

"In generative AI, you always have questions about IP protection," she said. "You want to know what kind of data was used to train the models. That's why I'm saying currently for Gen AI our main