As revealed by The Verge, PlayStation are working on testing AI characters in their biggest games, with a video of an AI Aloy responding to questions when asked being leaked. While the answers seem reasonable, the voice and way she responds feels very unlike Ashly Burch’s great performance in the Horizon games, and it just fills us with a very uneasy feeling.
The original YouTube video for the AI test has been hit with copyright by Sony and taken down. We imagine people have made copies of it somewhere, though. The person asking AI Aloy the questions in the video is Sony software engineering director Sharwin Raghoebardajal, who was handling the test on a PC. As you can guess, it is believed that they are testing this on PlayStation 5 as well.
The questions in the video we saw asked as it was being taken down were along the lines of, “Can I ask you questions?” and, “How does it feel to be a clone?” As noted above, the responses feel very AI in nature, in that the delivery is very robotic and unlively. The mouth movements also looked a bit off, but this wasn’t meant to be seen by the public.
When can you expect AI Aloy to haunt your dreams?
It’s not necessarily surprising that PlayStation and Guerrilla Games would be testing this kind of stuff out. In fact, we would bet they have also used Kratos and Ellie in similar tests. At this point, it feels like an inevitability that AI will play a significant part in the future of developing games. That said, this kind of stuff brings up red flags for us. For starters, imagine a world where Horizon 3 doesn’t hire Ashly Burch to return as Aloy, and instead, the game just uses AI to reproduce her voice in the new game. Testing with AI and making it good enough to steal jobs from voice actors and the many people making games on an everyday basis is scary for workers all across the industry right now.
We should probably note the ironic elephant in the room. Aloy in the Horizon games is constantly fighting against AI that destroyed all of civilization after big-headed CEOs sealed the old world to its fate. A perfect choice for testing out the new PlayStation AI.
