It looks like Sony has created an AI-powered version of Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn. In a leaked video shared anonymously with The Verge that has since been taken down by a copyright enforcement company associated with Sony, a PlayStation representative used the video to demonstrate Sony’s work in creating AI characters.
Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a director of software engineering at Sony, narrated the leaked video, which showed a rendition of Aloy responding to questions with an AI-generated voice and facial movements. She answered questions about herself, what she sees, and similarly pointless queries correctly, but without being specific, and when asked how she was doing, inexplicably said she had a sore throat.
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She also apparently looked and sounded very much like AI, as these things often do. The demo used OpenAI’s Whisper for speech-to-text, and GPT-4 and Llama 3 for decision making, while Sony’s own Emotional Voice Synthesis was used to put all that into actress Ashly Burch’s voice and its eerily titled Mockingbird technology to create the facial animations.
While the video has been thoroughly copyright struck off the internet (Sony really didn’t want this out in the open, it seems), comments on its YouTube upload as screenshotted by PC Gamer describe the video as “creepy”, “slop”, “weird”, and “cursed”. One comment says simply, “Amazing. Please work on literally anything else.” That basically sums up my feelings.
AI-Generated Horizon Zero Dawn, Of All Things?
It’s tone-deaf enough that Sony is using tech to mimic voice actress Ashly Burch considering she’s gone on strike with SAG-AFTRA over protections against AI technology, but it’s also very funny considering what Horizon Zero Dawn is about. The entire premise of the series is that human tribes are fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where humanity was almost completely wiped out after civilisation collapsed. What caused the collapse, you ask? Self-replicating military AI robots. The irony almost brings me to tears.
Aloy is also, in my opinion, Sony’s most boring protagonist, so I guess it makes sense they’d just replace her personality with AI.
There are other things about the demo that don’t make sense. Aloy is the protagonist, so there’s no reason you’d need to talk to her, or ask her stupid questions about things you can see with your own eyes. It’s pretty clear that, as Raghoebardajal clarifies in the video, that this is just a tech showcase to present what’s possible.
This Isn’t Tech We Should Expect To See Anytime Soon
Raghoebardajal himself says, “we’ll not go into whether this is fun for games,”, and the footage also fails to explain whether it makes sense to be talking to Aloy, or how this could possibly run on consumer consoles as they exist now. It’s not implementable, just a prototype to play with.
And thank god for that, because imagine seeing something this depressing and bad-looking in a triple-A video game on, presumably, newer and even more expensive console tech. Yikes. Apart from the ethical and aesthetic issues, I can’t imagine a worse way to design a game, especially if it’s to be used with NPCs.
Many a gamer bro fantasises about being able to ask any character any question and get a cogent answer in keeping with their personality, what they know, and the world they’re in, but as many developers have pointed out, including Obsidians’s Josh Sawyer, EA Motive’s Ashley Cooper, and CD Projekt Red’s Anna Megill, AI NPCs are boring and bad game design. As they exist now, NPCs help to direct the player while propelling the story forward.
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This is great news (even if I still don’t completely understand James Cameron’s take on AI).
Even if you imagine the best case scenario – an AI NPC doesn’t break character or immersion, hallucinate information, or spoil the game for you – what does it add, apart from a way for you to waste your time? Games are designed to push you forward. NPCs that waste your time destroy momentum, and players in turn will lose direction.
It just doesn’t work, and I think Sony knows that. At least in narrative-driven games where the story and plot are key, generative AI NPCs just don’t have a place. But that’s not to say we won’t see this tech in other sorts of games – I can totally imagine free-to-play games like The First Descendant implementing this kind of tech so you can talk to characters while they jiggle at you, especially considering it’s already been experimenting with AI NPCs.
But will you be seeing it in the prestige stuff? I don’t think so, at least, not anytime soon. We can all breathe a sigh of relief, because, again – yikes.
- Released
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February 28, 2017
- ESRB
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T for Teen – Blood, Drug Reference, Language, Mild Sexual Themes, Violence