PlayStation sees AI as a ‘powerful tool’ to help make games

As part of an earnings presentation on Friday, Sony shared how it’s thinking about AI at the company, including many details about how it’s evaluating AI as part of making PlayStation games. Generative AI has recently been showing up in bigger games — though many indie developers still reject it — and while Sony calls AI a “powerful tool,” it says that the “vision, the design, and the emotional impact of our games will always come from the talent of our studios and performers.” and that “AI is meant to augment their capabilities, not to replace them.”

At its own studios, Sony says that developers are “automating repetitive workflows, improving software engineering productivity, and accelerating areas like quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation through new, AI-powered tools.” One example is with a tool called “Mockingbird” that can animate 3D facial models using performance capture data, and Sony says that Mockingbird is finishing animation work that previously took hours in “a fraction of a second.”

The Last of Us creator Naughty Dog and God of War developer Santa Monica Studio are among those that have used the tool, and work from Mockingbird has shown up in titles including Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. However, “we are not replacing human performers, but rather optimizing how we process the data from these live captures,” according to Sony.

Sony also says that it has partnered with Bandai Namco to “explore how Generative AI and the latest technologies can most effectively contribute to realizing a creator’s vision in the realm of video production.” Through their “explorations,” the companies have identified “massive gains in speed and productivity per person” and opportunities where “AI can produce highly sophisticated and realistic outputs” that otherwise haven’t been feasible due to “time constraints.” But Sony also notes the “lack of consistency and controllability” as a weakness of generative AI models.

As part of its earnings, Sonly also said that PS5 sales dropped by 46 percent year over year following significant price hikes.