EA’s Cutting-Edge AI Concept Imagines A Pile Of Boxes

Picture, if you will, a world in which your wildest gameplay whims can come to life in an instant – no muss, fuss, or coding required. What would you do? What vast possibility spaces would you pluck from the infinite realms of your imagination? At a recent investor event, EA went with boxes.

EA chief strategy officer Mihir Vaidya introduced the company’s new “Imagination to Creation” AI pipeline with a concept video, meaning one made with intention – almost certainly by human beings – to convey why this thing is The Future. And yet, able to mock up pretty much anything, especially given the pie-in-the-heavens rhetoric the letters A and I often inspire, EA settled on two “community-designed” generi-characters hopping around a glorified box fort. 

Commands like “make it more complex” and “make it multi-level” just added more boxes, seemingly with little rhyme or reason, let alone attention to meaningful level design. After some light skirmishing, one player – sounding as much like a real person as every other actor in the industry’s long history of labored co-op game “demos” – told the AI to “make it more epic.” This, too, added more boxes.

Vaidya boasted that in this currently-imaginary vision of the future, users will be able to take elements from EA games’ asset libraries and remix them. “Elements like characters, gameplay systems, weapons, and logic,” he said. If you’re an investor, the target audience for this presentation, I’m sure you were floored. Infinite content with minimal input. Gray slop oozing forth from an endless faucet. Finally, your precious numbers and lines can go up forever.

But EA’s concept video – which, again, could have been anything but for some reason settled on boxes – mostly demonstrates how profoundly unimaginative this whole enterprise is. Assuming EA can create something that reliably works this way – itself a big if – then you’re basically getting a set of Legos that a machine assembles for you. Direct control is minimal. You just lob prompts at the AI and see what it spits out. And these building blocks come from preexisting games, so the end result will necessarily be a mishmash of ideas and characters with no understanding of how they are meant to fit together, because AI cannot understand.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Modding communities have been remixing their favorite games for nearly as long as video games have existed, and they’re thriving. There are arguably too many mods of popular games like Skyrim and Doom – more than any single person could ever try. These were born of actual creativity and ingenuity; instead of painting firmly within the lines – as AI must – modders redefined them, in the process creating some of today’s most popular genres (not to mention landing themselves jobs, in some cases). 

If this year has shown us anything, it’s that people don’t want derivative games made of parts from cast-off playsets. They want experiences that legitimately spirit them and their friends away to new places, that are exciting enough to dislodge them from established games that have become comforting daily rituals. To call what EA is doing “imagination” is an insult to the word. Nobody in this process is imagining anything. Piece by piece, box by box, EA is attempting to build a rehash machine, one in which players whose data the company is hoovering up are all cogs. Let us hope it does not succeed.