EA employees are reportedly frustrated by a mandate to use AI, mocking the policy in Slack and suspecting it’s being used as justification for layoffs

The generative AI wave has tech companies foaming at the mouth to get in while the getting’s good, and while that might be creating a disastrously huge financial bubble, it’s also changing the way companies operate. Microsoft has made it no secret that AI is non-negotiable for its employees, and it seems that EA is following suit, according to a report by Business Insider.

The report states that EA’s C-suite “has spent the past year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for just about everything.” That includes AI training courses, an internal chatbot called ReefGPT, and full-on task automation.

One anonymous employee in the report, a former senior QA worker at Respawn Entertainment, said that AI “was able to perform a key part of his job—reviewing and summarizing feedback from hundreds of play testers,” according to Business Insider. He was laid off in April, and the report said he suspects AI integration is related.

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That generative AI tools necessarily improve workflow seems like a dubious proposition; an Upwork study found that 77% of workers reported that AI tools added to their workload despite confidence from leadership. That checks out with the Business Insider report, which notes that ReefGPT was prone to hallucinations and wrote bad code that then had to be corrected. That same report shares a candid moment from an EA Slack channel where a meme was posted mocking the C-suite’s directionless insistence on AI and raked in the laughing emojis.

Generative AI is going to be hard to avoid (and spot) in games for the foreseeable future. Investors are betting the farm on the technology, and an estimated 87% of game developers are already using it. It’s a spurious justification for layoffs, one of a depressingly long list of bad excuses the games industry has come up with in the 2020s.