EA Shuts Down Battlefield-Playing AI After It Starts Complaining About DLC

Electronic Arts’ GDC debut of a ground-breaking distributed AI capable of playing Battlefield was ruined last week, after the AI alt-tabbed out of the game, logged onto the official Battlefield forums, and began complaining about over-priced DLC.

Engineer’s from EA’s “Search For Extraordinary Experiences Division”, or SEED, rushed over to the demonstration hardware and began ripping out power cords in a desperate attempt to slow the machine down, but Point & Clickbait understands that the AI was able to deploy no less than half-a-dozen racially-charged slurs at the development team in under three seconds.

“It certainly was an extraordinary experience, but not one that I would like to repeat,” explained a SEED engineer to Point & Clickbait, once the “rogue AI” had been dealt with and a confused GDC audience had been placated.

“The distributed AI network is supposed to learn how to play the game through trial and error, yes – but only from observing its own behaviour, not from human teams we deployed it against in the testing stage. Clearly there has been some kind of contamination.”

Once the AI was re-booted and firmly fenced into the game itself, the presentation continued. Footage released from GDC appears to demonstrate that the AI is quite capable of playing the game at a mostly competent level, although even the best programmers in EA’s SEED division admit that getting AI players to focus on the objective is difficult.

“I jumped into a game with the bots and the first thing one of them did was ask me about my KDR and then drive away in an empty tank,” said one engineer. “They’re so lifelike. It’s beautiful.”