As a company and first-party platform, PlayStation and Sony have not shied away from using AI as part of their value proposal to consumers. While competitor Microsoft has made a big show about using it for game ideation and prototyping, Sony has instead focused on using AI and machine-learning for frame generation and hardware uses, largely staying away from experimenting with its acclaimed software portfolio from PlayStation Worldwide Studios. But if a leaked video is any indication, that may soon change.
In a report from The Verge, a tipster pointed attention at a YouTube video from what appears to be an internal presentation at Sony. The video has now been taken down as a result of a copyright claim from a company named Muso, which acts as a copyright enforcement company that lists Sony Entertainment as one of its clients. In the video, PlayStation character Aloy — protagonist of both Horizon titles — answers questions from the player characters with artificially-generated animations, writing, and voice. The video itself is narrated by Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a director of software engineering at Sony Entertainment whose main responsibilities include the intersection of video game technology and AI.
At no point does Raghoebardajal indicate this is a product that’s due to be announced or integrated into games. The narration states that this technology has been developed alongside Guerilla Games as a prototype for internal Sony presentations.
The demo itself is powered using OpenAI’s whisper for speech-to-text and GPT-4 and Llama 3 as the conversational brain. Sony’s own Emotional Voice Synthesis controls the speech generation, while its Mockingbird technology powers the facial animation. Aloy’s model is reproduced from Horizon: Forbidden West, the previous mainline Horizon title. While the VR Horizon game, Call of the Mountain, allowed players to speak with Aloy as they inhabited another character, this demo assumes a more dissociated role even though the player in Forbidden West would be controlling Aloy.
In the games, Aloy is voiced by Ashley Burch, a union actor best known outside of video games for her role in Mythic Quest but ubiquitous within the realm of video game voice acting. We reached out to Burch’s publicist but have not heard back by the time of publishing. SAG-AFTRA is still on a conditional strike over protections against AI in voice acting, including voice replacements.
More to the point, it’s a little difficult to see the utility in having unending conversations with video game characters. Both Horizon titles were praised for their writing and narratives about characters rebuilding a world after runaway technology ended it. Replacing that with AI does not seem like it would increase the player’s enjoyment all that much. Perhaps Sony has more ideas about where this could take video game design than just what is seen on the surface.
