There had been a couple emails like this sent to the employees of the studio, which produces the juggernaut Call of Duty series. A previous one had approved the internal use of generative AI tools Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for producing concept art. That spring, backchannel chats lit up with rumors, worry, and whisper networks of whose jobs AI might replace. Where executives saw reason for excitement, many game artists, writers, and designers saw a direct threat to their livelihoods.
“And I think it’s pretty obvious there’s a negative sentiment among game workers.” Last May, Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Willson said on a quarterly earnings call that, “the fear of displacement of the workforce is something we read a lot about and we talk a lot about.' He noted that in every revolution—agricultural, industrial—there “has been displacement of the workforce in the near term, and then meaningful increases in workforce opportunities over the longer term.