EA's generative AI mandate backfires as devs clean up AI mess

Following the $55 billion EA buyout, the company has been exploring deeper AI integrations in order to reduce staff. Its internal generative chatbot, ReefGPT, was introduced last year with the capability of turning text into real time renders. Now, it looks like this AI mandate has not been working out for the company as it’s having to spend more resources on cleaning up the mess left behind by the AI.

Citing a paywalled report from Business Insider, Tweaktown states that there is friction between the developers and the management at EA. Apparently, ReefGPT is less than efficient in generating code and is making mistakes that are causing issues for the developers. It adds that some sources have even stated that it is creating “hallucinations” that the developers are having to manually fix.

Since this active fixing has to take place in real-time, workers have to dedicate their work hours towards babysitting these experimental AI tools. This is reportedly costing the company more, rather than bringing expenditure down.

What’s more concerning is that all this is just training the AI to be better, pushing it closer to its ultimate goal of replacing human developers. EA has been aggressively mandating the use of AI, according to the report, and it was also criticized earlier this year for having voice actors train voice generator tools. Same was the case with game artists as noted by the Financial Times report from earlier this year.