{"id":596863,"date":"2025-11-27T09:29:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T09:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/596863\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T09:29:26","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T09:29:26","slug":"ea-used-ai-to-make-tkachuk-nhl-26-cover-art-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/596863\/","title":{"rendered":"EA Used AI To Make Tkachuk NHL 26 Cover Art Possible"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NHL 26 Deluxe Edition features the Tkachuk hockey family<\/a> on the cover. The Panthers\u2019 Matthew Tkachuk and Senators\u2019 Brady Tkachuk appear alongside their father, the legendary power forward Keith Tkachuk, beneath bright lights on a hazy skating rink. What EA hasn\u2019t previously disclosed is that it employed generative AI tools to help with the creation of the $100 version\u2019s promotional art.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s production process.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cOld school\u201d head swaps using Photoshop were ruled out, so EA, with permission from the family, 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\u2019s unclear what percentage of the final result was entirely AI-generated.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI was used to generate stylized mockups during exploration,\u201d reads part of one slide from the presentation. It explains that Marr\u2019s 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 \u201cpresent and the past\u201d to train a model to de-age Keith and generate \u201cPRIME Keith.\u201d\u00a0A final pass of AI was used to normalize the lighting across the different models before turning back to Photoshop for the final touchup.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. EA in particular has been racing to embrace the technology. Over a year ago, CEO Andrew Wilson openly praised the company\u2019s use of AI<\/a> to help create the thousands of faces required for the return of its top-selling College Football franchise.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeave AI to its own devices, your work won\u2019t be exceptional\u201d <\/p>\n

But some employees on the ground floor are balking at the technology, with a few recently telling Business Insider<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe view AI as a powerful accelerator of creativity, innovation, and player connection,\u201d Wilson told investors during the company\u2019s May earnings report. \u201cAcross our teams, we\u2019re 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\u2019s possible in design, animation and storytelling helping us deliver deeper, more immersive game play.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does that mean in practice? Marr\u2019s presentation offers a small clue. In his \u201ckey learnings\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cUse AI to extend your ambition,\u201d one of the presentation slides reads. \u201cIf you leave AI to its own devices, your work won\u2019t be exceptional.\u201d Below that loaded statement is a screenshot of a headline dunking on Coca-Cola\u2019s recent AI holiday as a \u201csloppy eyesore.\u201d The sentiment seems to be that AI tools work best when no one can tell they were ever used in the first place.<\/p>\n

A brave new world of AI selling card packs <\/p>\n

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,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Another section of the internal presentation had to do with using customer service AI tools to offer players in-game help. If you\u2019re 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\u2019s possible applications also suggests a third option: buying card packs.<\/p>\n

\u201cOr here\u2019s a pack that can help you level faster,\u201d reads the onscreen suggestion on one presentation slide. The bot continues, \u201cIt\u2019s got quarterbacks and receivers with top-tier precision stats\u2013great for tightening up short routes and throws.\u201d There\u2019s no evidence that EA is currently planning to implement a feature like this in its actual games, but it\u2019s the perfect encapsulation of why so many players are reflexively anti-AI to begin with.<\/p>\n

EA declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Update 11\/26\/25 12:08 p.m. ET: EA confirmed that the Tkachuk family gave permission for AI to be used.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NHL 26 Deluxe Edition features the Tkachuk hockey family on the cover. The Panthers\u2019 Matthew Tkachuk and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,2244,187596,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-596863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-ea","11":"tag-nhl-26","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115620961554027031","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}