It started with a meme — a man asking a group of CEOs what they want. “AI!” they shout. “AI to do what?” “We don’t know!” It got passed around Slack channels at Electronic Arts, punctuated by laughing emojis.
But behind the laughter, as described in Business Insider’s exposé on EA’s internal divide, lies a very real tension between leadership’s enthusiasm for automation and developers’ fear of being replaced by it.
Electronic Arts, the gaming giant behind “The Sims” and “Madden NFL,” has spent the past year urging its nearly 15,000 employees to use AI for coding, concept art, and even performance conversations. Some staff say it feels less like innovation and more like pressure.
One anonymous developer told colleagues that the company’s in-house chatbot, ReefGPT, “hallucinates” — spitting out code so buggy it takes longer to fix than to write manually.
Similar frustrations have cropped up across industries as companies like Microsoft and Shopify push their own AI mandates.
The irony isn’t lost on many creatives — that the very people who brought artificial intelligence into gaming through NPCs and enemy logic are now resisting it in their workflows.
According to a survey by Game Developer and Omdia, nearly a third of respondents said generative AI was harming the industry, citing concerns over ethics, originality, and job erosion.
The same study found that half of developers worry about IP theft and bias baked into AI tools.
And honestly, who can blame them? It’s one thing to automate spreadsheet summaries — another entirely to automate imagination.
Game artists have spent decades honing worlds pixel by pixel. When a model starts spitting out character designs that “borrow” from existing art, it feels like déjà vu with a copyright twist.
Even Forbes’ coverage of AI in creative industries notes that artists are increasingly caught between the thrill of new tools and the dread of obsolescence.
Still, AI isn’t going anywhere. EA isn’t alone — studios from Ubisoft to Activision are exploring ways to use machine learning to test gameplay, balance difficulty, and generate environments.
The difference, perhaps, is how it’s introduced. Some studios treat AI as a sidekick; others, like EA, seem to be turning it into a requirement.
One recently laid-off QA designer from EA’s Respawn studio told colleagues he suspects automation in playtesting summaries — once his main task — contributed to his dismissal. It’s the kind of quiet shift that turns whispers into worries.
There’s a broader irony here too. Game developers, once the architects of virtual worlds, are now asking the same questions their own NPCs never could: Where does this leave us?
What happens when the tool becomes the artist? If leadership doesn’t bridge that emotional divide soon, morale might become the next casualty of automation.
And as one veteran designer half-joked in an internal thread, “AI might make the next Battlefield faster — but who’ll still be around to play it?”
