PlayStation is testing AI-driven characters, and I’m not a fan

If you’ve been dreaming about having a more in-depth conversation with one of your favorite gaming characters, it seems that Sony is working on making that happen. A leaked video shows Aloy, the main character from Horizon Forbidden West, having a conversation with the player and explaining her background. I’ve seen the video, and while I’m impressed with the advancement of AI, I’m not sure how I feel about the result so far.

A leaker sent a video to The Verge, showcasing a PlayStation prototype where Sharwin Raghoebardajal, Sony’s director of software engineering, speaks to Aloy. It’s an odd thing, given that you play as Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West, but the overall impression from the video is even weirder.

Raghoebardajal asks Aloy to tell him more about the fact that she’s been looking for her mother.  The dialogue flows naturally even though the responses are powered by AI, but Aloy’s voice and facial expressions are a give away for the fact that this is all generated and not made by developers. It dips into uncanny valley territory.

A bit of the video follows below, but be careful — it does spoil some Horizon Forbidden West storylines.

Upon the initial leak, it was unclear whether the video was legitimate or not, although it certainly seemed to be that way. The Verge said that the video was nothing more than a prototype that the company developed with Guerrilla Games; the idea was to show off the technology at Sony, so this wasn’t meant to be seen by outsiders. The demo features OpenAI’s whisper model to power speech-to-text; meanwhile, GPT-4 and Llama 3 are said to have been used for the conversations.

There’s now been an update that gives it all more weight, though. The original leaked video has since been taken down by Muso, which, as The Verge explains, is a copyrights enforcement company for Sony Interactive Entertainment. That covers PlayStation.

It’s unclear when, or if, Sony will start using AI-driven characters in actual games. The company isn’t the first to experiment with using AI to power character interactions. Nvidia has shared multiple demos of Ace, its suite of AI-generated NPC tools, and Ubisoft and Tencent are starting to use it.