EA is certainly eager to start using AI in all games. CEO Andrew Wilson is so enthusiastic that he can't stop talking about it: on May 3 he was imagining a dark future in which 30 billion people were using it, and

But on Twitter, former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider is fiercely critical of the EA boss and his breathtaking Hosanna to AI. So I might take Wilson's words with a grain of salt. In response to Wilson's comments, Guider wrote that "The 'hunger' mentioned here is the appeal of a spreadsheet where labor costs suddenly appear as small little bars compared to other bars, with a bunch of executives around the table nodding and repeating 'ROI' and 'good, yes, good' over and over."

"They want us to believe that the developers under them are very excited about working generative AI into their processes," Gaider continued, "

It's both brutal and, I have to say, incredibly incredible. Gaider is a veteran of BioWare and left the company and its owner, EA, in 2016. His name can be found in all sorts of RPG classics, including Dragon Age, Balder's Gate 2, Kotor and Never Winter Nights. It's also featured in Anthem, BioWare's live-service shooter game that withered on a vine in 2021.

Gaider wrote for Anthem before leaving BioWare, but the game's story was rebooted after he left, but it is likely he is part of a previous fateful "mission" from the executive and Gaider describes the process in a reply to another tweet

"The executive is a new Thing™ and everyone (if they mention it) needs to know what to do."

For Anthem, reality was revealed when the game came out in lukewarm reviews and died a few years later. For AI, as everyone knows, for all the raving about the incomparable potential that AI offers to developers, at least not in a way that is visible to players, yet it has not made a big splash in the game (a GDC survey found that, after all, 31% of developers already use AI in some capacity). So it's hard to say what the future is.

I have to say, but I tend to agree with Gaider. I don't doubt that AI is here to maintain some capacity, but I hope that the labor organization and struggle will leave it firmly in the hands of workers, not bosses — Wilson's proposed world of billions of people occupying some new AI plane of reality seems like a strange dream. One day, I wouldn't be surprised if I looked back at the executive hype for technology, just as we're seeing now, well, games like Anthem.