EA Sports Uses AI to Create NHL 26 Cover Art Amid Company-Wide AI Push

EA Used AI To Make Tkachuk NHL 26 Cover Art Possible

The NHL 26 Deluxe Edition features the Tkachuk hockey family on the cover. The Panthers' Matthew Tkachuk and Senators' Brady Tkachuk appear alongside their father, the legendary power forward Keith Tkachuk, beneath bright lights on a hazy skating rink. What EA hasn't previously disclosed is that it employed generative AI tools to help with the creation of the $100 version's promotional art. The company touted this achievement during a recent internal presentation to its player experience team, according to materials reviewed by Kotaku. In a section led by long-time EA sports marketing head Paul Marr, staff were briefed on how the company used AI tools like GPT and Comfy UI in the cover art's production process. There were two major hurdles to the concept: Keith Tkachuk is old now, and both of his sons were in the playoffs and not available for conventional photoshoots. "Old school" head swaps using Photoshop were ruled out, so EA leaned on generative AI to de-age Keith and re-create his sons instead. While all of this was led and reviewed by human creatives, it's unclear what percentage of the final result was entirely AI-generated. "AI was used to generate stylized mockups during exploration," reads part of one slide from the presentation. It explains that Marr's team used a library of images and expressions for each athlete to train AI on what they looked like. It also used reference imagery from the "present and the past" to train a model to de-age Keith and generate "PRIME Keith."Â A final pass of AI was used to normalize the lighting across the different models before turning back to Photoshop for the final touchup. The NHL 26 Deluxe Edition cover art is the latest example of how game companies are using AI even as their players rebel against any possible whiff of it. EA in particular has been racing to embrace the technology. Over a year ago, CEO Andrew Wilson openly praised the company's use of AI to help create the thousands of faces required for the return of its top-selling College Football franchise. But some employees on the ground floor are balking at the technology, with a few recently telling Business Insider that AI was producing programming code with errors, hallucinating unhelpful answers, or being trained on their own workflows in a way that could threaten their job security. "We view AI as a powerful accelerator of creativity, innovation, and player connection," Wilson told investors during the company's May earnings report. "Across our teams, we're investing in new workflows and capabilities to integrate AI to enhance how we build, scale and personalize experiences, from dynamic in-game worlds to delivering authentic athlete and team likenesses at incredible scale, our developers are using AI to push the boundaries of what's possible in design, animation and storytelling helping us deliver deeper, more immersive game play." What does that mean in practice? Marr's presentation offers a small clue. In his "key learnings" from the experiment with the NHL 26 Deluxe Edition cover, he encourages other employees to seek legal guidance but start using AI early since models can take a while to train. He also tries to maintain a hazy distinction between AI doing all of the work and humans still being in control of the creative process. "Use AI to extend your ambition," one of the presentation slides reads. "If you leave AI to its own devices, your work won't be exceptional." Below that loaded statement is a screenshot of a headline dunking on Coca-Cola's recent AI holiday as a "sloppy eyesore." The sentiment seems to be that AI tools work best when no one can tell they were ever used in the first place. EA is currently set to be sold to Saudi Arabia and others in a $55 billion leveraged buyout. According to reporting by The Financial Times, big bets on AI are one of the ways the company is expected to be able to service that debt moving forward. Some employees are worried that it could mean layoffs for them and a worse experience for players. Another section of the internal presentation had to do with using customer service AI tools to offer players in-game help. If you're struggling to pass in the latest College Football, for example, a chatbot might offer links to online guides or show brief tutorial videos to help. But a theoretical prototype for the technology's possible applications also suggests a third option: buying card packs. "Or here's a pack that can help you level faster," reads the onscreen suggestion on one presentation slide. The bot continues, "It's got quarterbacks and receivers with top-tier precision stats-great for tightening up short routes and throws." There's no evidence that EA is currently planning to implement a feature like this in its actual games, but it's the perfect encapsulation of why so many players are reflexively anti-AI to begin with.

"If you leave AI to its own devices, your work won't be exceptional" EA reportedly tells devs, despite a massive AI push following its $55 billion Saudi Arabian buyout

Despite an alleged company-wide AI rollout in recent months, EA leadership has reportedly told staff that AI should be used to "extend your ambition" rather than being left "to its own devices." This comes from an internal presentation within EA Sports, parts of which Kotaku managed to review. Paul Marr, former head of franchise strategy and marketing in EA Sports, now VP and executive creative director at EA, gave the talk, discussing the Deluxe Edition cover for NHL 26 that used generative AI. "Use AI to extend your ambition. If you leave AI to its own devices, your work won't be exceptional," says one of the slides. One of Coca-Cola's AI-generated advertisements is used as an example of "sloppy" output, though what it means to "extend your ambition" versus relying on it as a crutch is still vague, according to the report. The cover in question features Keith Tkachuk, a legendary hockey player, flanked by his two sons, Matthew and Brady Tkachuk, both now pros in the sport. Keith is de-aged, while Matthew and Brady's images are totally composite because they were unavailable to be photographed. AI was utilized at different points to generate the cover. As much is in line with purported mandates within Electronic Arts, where chatbots and artificial intelligence are now part of all processes, from creative to managerial. This comes post the massive $55 billion buyout from Saudi Arabia. However, there still seems to be some extent to which AI isn't to be used.