The Verge has shared a leaked Sony PlayStation video demonstrating an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West taking part in a conversation with Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a director of software engineering at SIE.
The video, which has since been taken down under a copyright claim, featured Aloy responding to questions from Raghoebardajal and showing off a segment of gameplay, after which the character described everything that happened in the clip. OpenAI's Whisper is used for the voice-to-text, OpenAI and Llama handle the conversation and decision-making, and the facial animations come from Sony's own internal Mockingbird system.
The system seen in the video is running on PC, but Raghoebardajal says they've been able to get Whisper and Mockingbird running on consoles (presumably PS5) "with relatively little overhead."
"Nothing is scripted," Raghoebardajal says in the video. "You can ask her anything, and she'll answer [as] Aloy."
It's not great, to be blunt. The interaction is stilted and awkward, and it's all very uncanny valley: It's very clearly a machine spouting off text-to-voice search results, and there's nothing organic or "natural" about it. Which is probably to be expected: Raghoebardajal says the initial demo was "just a quick, fun prototyping project," while the version seen in this video was bolstered by a few weeks of extra work for closed-door demonstrations at the Sony Technology Exchange Fair. The presentation is "just a glimpse of what is possible," Raghoebardajal says, and nowhere near a final product, or even meant for public consumption.
Despite those caveats, the reactions to the video on YouTube are not hugely positive. "Creepy," "ghastly," "rancid," and "cursed" are amongst the adjectives used to describe the video; one user begged Sony to "please work on literally anything else," while a couple others want to know—you can probably see this coming—why Sony is horsing around with this instead of making the Bloodborne remaster.
Not all of the complaints are entirely serious, of course, although the person noting the grim irony of doing an AI demo in a game in which AI was responsible for the annihilation of humanity makes a fair point. But there are also concerns expressed about the long-term impact of this sort of work on game development, particularly with regard to the role that voice actors will play in future productions.
Sony is far from unique in working on this sort of thing. Ubisoft and Inworld AI showed off their own AI-powered NPC creations at GDC in 2024, for instance, and Nvidia is working on "Co-Playable Character" technology in partnership with other developers including Krafton—not exactly the same thing, but broadly similar in the sense that it's AI stuff being shoehorned into videogames.
None of it has added up to much at this point, and as anyone who futzed with config files to improve the godawful NPC pathfinding in the original Baldur's Gate can tell you, there's definitely a place for better AI in videogames. But the rise of AI in game development has a potentially dark underbelly and there's a growing feeling of inevitability to it: I don't think AI will ever replicate the genuine human performances we've enjoyed in games like Baldur's Gate 3 or Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, but it's also presumably a whole lot cheaper (you don't have to pay a machine and they never need time off) and sooner or later that's going to start figuring into the conversation.
I've reached out to Sony for comment on the video and will update if I receive a reply.
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