In this case however, it explicitly is:

The project, which is titled Joint Development of Game QA Automation Technology Using Generative AI, is being tackled by “a joint research team of more than ten members”, including researchers from the University of Tokyo and engineers from the Square Enix group.

The goal, according to the report, is to “automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks in game development by the end of 2027”.

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.

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.