Whether or not it will come to pass remains to be seen, but one of the fears behind developing artificial intelligence (AI) is that one day it might become sentient and overthrow humanity, much like in James Cameron’s Terminator. Now it looks like EA could be helping it along because they have created a self-learning AI that actually taught itself how to play Battlefield 1. Yup, now there exists an AI that knows how to shoot and strategizes.

Jokes aside, this AI was created at Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division (SEED), a team at EA that was created to explore interactive entertainment. According to SEED’s technical director Magnus Nordin, this was inspired by an AI created by Alphabet’s DeepMind that taught itself how to play old Atari games where he wondered if AI could be smart enough to teach itself a more modern and complex title such as Battlefield.

According to Nordin, tests of the AI have gone pretty well. “We have conducted playtests, pitting AI agents against human players in a simplified game mode, restricted to handguns. While the human players outperformed the agents, it wasn’t a complete blowout by any stretch. The agent is pretty proficient at the basic Battlefield gameplay, and has taught itself to alter its behavior depending on certain triggers, like being low on ammo or health.”

It also seems that some of the participants in the tests requested that the AI be marked so that they could be properly distinguished, which Nordin takes as a good testament to how well they performed to the point where they might be confused with human players. EA isn’t the first to use games to test AI. A couple of years ago DeepMind worked with Blizzard to see if AI could self-learn how to play StarCraft 2.

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