‘Candy Crush’ Workers Were Allegedly Fired, Then Replaced by An A.I. They Helped Develop
My non-STEM degree might be useless, but at least I can’t build a replacement of myself.
Published 4 months ago in Facepalm
Bloomberg recently reported that King, the company behind games like Candy Crush, plans on cutting about 10 percent of its staff, amounting to at least 200 people.
Like in any layoff situation, the question then becomes, “Who’s going to do these people’s jobs?” Well, it turns out that these workers may have screwed themselves, as they’ve spent the past few years developing artificial-intelligence software that can do their jobs — and now, they’re being replaced by it.
According to MobileGamer, sources within the company are claiming that the A.I. tools that they’ve been developing, which assist in things like UX and narrative design, are now being used to replace them.
“Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they’ve spent months building tools to craft levels quicker,” claimed one source. “Now those A.I. tools are basically replacing the teams. Similarly the copywriting team is completely removing people since we now have A.I. tools that those individuals have been creating.”
Lesson learned: If you’ve developed software to make your job easier, keep it to yourself.