Ew, sounds like a great reason to not buy any Square Enix games…
I would initially tap the breaks on this, if for no other reason than “AI doing Q&A” reads more like corporate buzzwords than material policy. Big software developers should already have much of their Q&A automated, at least at the base layer. Further automating Q&A is generally a better business practice, as it helps catch more bugs in the Dev/Test cycle sooner.
Then consider that Q&A work by end users is historically a miserable and soul-sucking job. Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce. When compared to “AI is doing the art” this is night-and-day, the very definition of the “Getting rid of the jobs people hate so they can do the work they love” that AI was supposed to deliver.
Finally, I’m forced to drag out the old “95% of AI implementations fail” statistic. Far more worried that they’re going to implement a model that costs a fortune and delivers mediocre results than that they’ll implement an AI driven round of end-user testing.
Turning Q&A over to the Roomba AI to find corners of the setting that snag the user would be Gud Aktuly.
Converting those roles to debuggers and active devs does a lot for both the business and the workforce.
Hahahahaha… on wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
The thing about QA is the work is truly endless.
If they can do their work more efficiently, they don’t get laid off.
It just means a better % of edge cases can get covered, even if you made QAs operate at 100x efficiency, they’d still have edge cases not getting covered.
They’re just gonna lay them off.
And hire other people with the excess budget. Hell, depending on how badly these systems are implemented, you can end up with more staff supporting the testing system than you had doing the testing.
I was going to say, this is one job that actually makes sense to automate. I don’t know any QA testers personally, but I’ve heard plenty of accounts of them absolutely hating their jobs and getting laid off after the time crunch anyway.
The repetition of “Q&A” reads like this comment was also outsourced to AI.
What does Q&A stand for?
Ugh. QA. Quality Assurance. Reflexively jamming that & because I am a bad AI.
Regardless, digital simulated users are going to be able to test faster, more exhaustively, and with more detailed diagnostics, than manual end users.
They already have a really cool solution for that, which they talked about in their GDC talk.. I don’t think there’s any need to slap a glorified chatbot into this, it already seems to work well and have just the right amount of human input to be reliable, while also leaving the “testcase replay gruntwork” to a script instead of a human.
That’s a stupid idea. You’re not supposed to QA or debug games. You just release it, customers report bugs, and then you promise to fix the bugs in the next patch (but don’t).
No better testing than in production.
Literally not how any of this works. You don’t let AI check your work, at best you use AI and check it’s work, and at worst you have to do everything by hand anyway.
You don’t let AI check your work
From a game dev perspective, user
Q&AQA is often annoying and repetitive labor. Endlessly criss-crossing terran hitting different buttons to make sure you don’t snag a corner or click objects in a sequence that triggers a state freeze. Hooking a PS controller to Roomba logic and having a digital tool rapidly rerun routes and explore button combos over and over, looking for failed states, is significantly better for you than hoping an overworked team of dummy players can recreate the failed state by tripping into it manually.There’s plenty of room for sophisticated automation without any need to involve AI.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
Past that, advanced pathing algorithms are what Q&A systems need to validate all possible actions within a space. That’s the bread-and-butter of AI. Its also generally how you’d describe simulated end-users on a test system.
I mean, as a branding exercise, every form of sophisticated automation is getting the “AI” label.
The article is specifically talking about generative AI. I think we need to find new terminology to describe the kind of automation that was colloquially referred to as AI before chatgpt et al. came into existence.
The important distinction, I think, is that these things are still purpose-built and (mostly) explainable. When you have a bunch of nails, you design a hammer. An “AI bot” QA tester the way Booty describes in the article isn’t going to be an advanced algorithm that carries out specific tests. That exists already and has for years. He’s asking for something that will figure out specific tests that are worth doing when given a vague or nonexistent test plan, most likely. You need a human, or an actual AGI, for something on that level, not generative AI.
And explicitly with generative AI, as pertains to Square Enix’s initiative in the article, there are the typical huge risks of verifiability and hallucination. However unpleasant you may think a QA worker’s job is now, I guarantee you it will be even more unpleasant when the job consists of fact-checking AI bug reports all day instead of actually doing the testing.
If it does the job better, who the fuck cares. No one actually cares about how you feel about the tech. Cry me a river.
The problem is that if it doesn’t do a better job, no one left in charge will even know enough to give a shit, so quality will go down.
its *
Ironically, that’s definitely something AI could check for.
Spell check? Yeah fair enough. The misspelling has historical value now though so I have to keep it in :P
Ask it for many R’s there are in strawberry
So Square Enix is demanding OpenAI stop using their content, but is 100% okay using AI built off stolen content to make more money themselves
As a developer, it bothers me that my code is being used to train AI that Square Enix is using while trying to deny anyone else the ability to use their work
I could go either way on whether or not AI should be able to train on available data, but no one should get to have it both ways
Well, good luck with that. Software development is a shit show already anyway. You can find me in my Gardening business in 2027.
Good Luck. When the economy finally bottoms out the first budget to go is always the gardening budget.
You can find me in my plumbing business in 2028.
I deal with shit daily so it’s what we in biz call a horizontal promotion.
Market gardening isn’t so bad, people gotta eat. But yeah, if you’re cutting lawns you’re going to suffer when the economy shits the bed.
That is a valid point, and I think i’ll preemptively pivot to woodworking.
Square Enix actually has a pretty sick automated QA already. There’s a cool talk about how they did that for FFVII remake in GDC vault, and I highly recommend watching it, if you’re at all interested in QA.
It has nothing to do with AI, it’s just plain old automation, but they solve most of the issues you get with making automated tests in non-discrete 3D playspace and they do that in a pretty solid way. It’s definitely something I’d love to have implemented in the games I’m working on, as someone who worked in QA and now works in development. Being able to have mostly reliable way how to smoke-test levels for basic gameplay without having to torture QA to run the test-case again is good, and allows QA to focus on something else - but the tools also need oversight, so it’s not really a job lost. In summary - I think the talk is cool tech and worth the watch.
However, I don’t think AI will help in this regard, and something as unreliable and random as AI models are not a good fit for this job. You want to have deterministic testcases that you can quanitfy, and if something doesn’t match have an actual human to look at why. AI also probably won’t be able to find clever corner-cases and bugs that need human ingenuity.
Fuck AI, I kind of hope this is just a marketing talk and they are actually just improving the (deterministic) tools they already have (which actually are AI by definition, since they also do level exploration on top of recorded inputs), and they are calling it an “AI” to satisfy investors/management without actually slapping a glorified chat-bot into the tech for no reason.
Realistic goal considering they already do so little QA.
Remember when square used to make great games?
That was Squaresoft, not Square Enix.
I loved Enix’s Ogre Battle and Square’s Final Fantasy 6 and 7. How could putting the companies together make a bad?!
Square Ewwwwnix
My memory failed me. Thanks for the correction.
Not buying their next game it will be a nightmare
And I thought I had no more disappointment left to allocate
It’s just that you’ve reached your free quota, further disappointments will be charged 0.0937 emotional stability per hour
Considering how the open source community is being inundated with low-quality bug reports filed using AI, I don’t have much faith in the tech reviewing code, let alone writing it correctly.
Could it be a useful aid? Sure, but 70% of your reviewing is a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. AI just isn’t ready for this level of responsibility in any organization.
it’s a bit late in the game to be making idiotic claims but I guess the default state for corpos is being out of touch
Frankly, this is good news. Whoever buys the rights to kingdom hearts in 3 years when the company falls apart might manage to create an intelligible storyline.
I get that getting all the games as they released was hard, because the series is on so many platforms. But I really don’t get the “KH is hard to understand” argument today, because you can easily find hundreds of letsplays for every game, cutscenes complications, play/watch every game on the PS4 remix disk, and even watch a fandub of the mobile games (Dark Road is a WIP) if you don’t like the KHUX Back Cover recap.
So like, what’s so hard? If you skip games and only read a wiki (the worst possible way to consume any sort of media, mind you), of course you’re not gonna know the story and characters, and of course it’ll sound confusing.
Dude, it’s multi-author-comic level bad. I’ve skipped entire sagas in several book series due to a lack of translations and ended up less confused. It’s green arrow levels of clone shenanigans.
To be clear, I’ve played most of the games and they’re still ridiculously difficult to keep track of. All besides the mobile, early non-Ventus card mechanic arpg, and the disappearing girl clone sora game.
They’d be easier to follow if they stuck to the rules of their own universe. Body and heart separate and the body persists not once but twice? What?
Square Enix exec doesn’t know what QA and Debugging entail.
“Well it works for unit testing, so just extend that out to all testing! Problem solved!” -Senior Management, probably
Who am I kidding. They have no idea what unit testing is.
