Sony lays out AI gaming use case, wants to use AI for content discovery, player customization

Sony wants to ultimately use AI to help evolve the player experience as well as streamline how PlayStation games are made.

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AI is everywhere these days, and that especially rings true for gaming, where AI has been used for decades. But how AI is being used in games development has changed. AI is being used to help automate certain rote processes and whole console chips like the PlayStation 5 Pro's SoC are now being built around the use of AI.

There's not a lot of details on how AI will actually affect player interactions, and some use cases remain speculative. Sony, for its part, has outlined a rough draft on the kinds of ways that PlayStation gamers can expect to be involved with artificial intelligence.

Sony didn't make any announcements and nothing's been confirmed so far, but these comments serve as a kind of guide for what might be coming down the pipeline with future PS5, PS5 Pro, or even PS6 updates.

Here's what PlayStation's head corporate leadership said about AI during a recent company business meeting:

Hideaki Nishino, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO:

Longer-term, we are exploring new possibilities with using AI to enhance gaming experiences in new ways for players. These initiatives are still early, but there are promising areas we're excited about.

Hermen Hulst, Studio Business Group CEO at Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE):

In our studios, we've been using AI obviously for quite a while, but we continue to explore possibilities of AI within studios, within game development, and how that can enhance creators' as well as players' experiences.

I don't actually expect, in the near future, a dramatic reduction in the cost of games development, I think it'd be unfair to claim that. But I do see tremendous potential benefits with AI as a set of tools to further enable our developers.

We continue to explore use cases in that space, for example there's potential for use in improving game characters, backgrounds, animation, audio translation, real-time graphics--you name it.

As well as potential applications in supporting live service content pipelines through much more opportunity to personalize the experience for individual uses.

So overall, I think AI will have an overall huge range of impact.

There's also innovations like this Sony patent, which would use AI for "real-time predictive gaming" in hardware like, say, the next-gen PlayStation 6.

Microsoft has laid out its plans for gaming AI as a three-pronged approach that largely meshes with my own ideas on gaming AI:

1. Accelerating content creation
2. Discovery
3. Player assistance