A story on NYTimes.com is titled "Busy Job of Judging Video-Game Content to Be Ceded to Machines," though that's a little misleading, as what's really happening is that the ESRB will begin giving games ratings based on surveys filled out by the developers, though they add that: "Major retail games — the ones advertised on television and stocked by Wal-Mart — will still be evaluated by real people. For now." They explain that there eventually be post-release testing: "All games rated via this new process will be tested by E.S.R.B. staff shortly after they are made publicly available to verify that disclosure was complete and accurate." They do note that the games don't actually get play-tested under the current system either:

The human game classifiers who will soon be ceding work to machines don’t actually play the games. Instead they watch a DVD submitted by a game’s publisher that is supposed to include the raunchiest and most violent scenes, if any. So they have not been experiencing games as they are played.