Sony hides evidence of AI being used to generate iconic PlayStation characters

Sony appears to be experimenting with feeding artificial intelligence systems assets from its staple franchises and asking it to recreate iconic characters from that franchise.

A new leak has revealed that Sony is, at the very least, looking into AI-generated characters from its staple franchises, with the leak being shared by The Verge that shows Horizon Forbidden West's Aloy being recreated with some kind of AI tool. The video, which has since been removed from YouTube due to copyright infringement, has been captured as the above GIF showed the iconic character responding to someone asking her questions, and the quality is clearly indicative of AI-generated content.

As you can probably imagine, the quality of the video is far below that of traditionally developed content, but according to reports, Sony celebrated what the AI produced in a behind-the-scenes presentation that has since gone public. Sharwin Raghoebardajal, the director of software engineering at Sony Interactive Entertainment, said the footage of Aloy is merely a prototype that has been developed alongside Guerrilla Games.

Aloy responding to questions

While this is just a prototype, Sony working on AI-generated processes raises a lot of eyebrows by principle, especially considering the current climate of AI-generated content making its way into video games. The topic is already contentious, but it appears there will be no putting this genie back in the bottle, it's just a matter of how and when it's used.

"This is just a glimpse of what is possible," says Raghoebardajal

Notably, the YouTube video is no longer available due to a copyright claim lodged by Muso, which lists Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation) as a client.