Sony is the latest company revealed to be testing the use of NPCs powered by generative AI in its games. After a prototype video showing an AI NPC in action was leaked online, players and game developers alike shared the same reaction to Sony’s technological leap — no, thanks.
Sony’s AI NPC project came to light after an internal video was shared with The Verge by an anonymous source. The video shows Horizon Forbidden West protagonist Aloy responding in real time to spoken questions, narrated by Sharwin Raghoebardajal, a software engineering director at Sony. The video has since been pulled offline due to a copyright claim, but it shows Aloy answering questions while speaking directly to the camera and during a short gameplay segment. The AI model is able to answer questions about the environment accurately, albeit vaguely, and offers the strange detail that it’s “dealing with a sore throat” when asks how it’s doing. All of this is of course delivered in the characteristically creepy tone that’s become a hallmark of AI-generated voices.
Raghoebardajal explains that the demo was developed alongside Guerilla Games to show off the technology internally at Sony, not to share with a wider audience. Along with Sony’s proprietary Mockingbird and Emotional Voice Synthesis systems for facial animations and speech generative, it uses OpenAI’s Whisper voice technology, plus the GPT-4 and Llama 3 language models.
While the demo uses Aloy as a character, that doesn’t mean plans are actually in the works for an AI-powered sequel to Horizon Forbidden West. Right now, the technology is just a prototype, and Sony hasn’t publicly said it’s working to integrate it into any specific game. If it does come to pass, the AI would likely be applied not to the main character of a game, like Aloy, but to NPCs, with whom players could have scintillating conversations about the weather and their scratchy throats.
The question that Sony’s demo doesn’t answer is, what on Earth is this for? The clear but never stated purpose of generative AI NPCs is to free developers from the onerous need to pay actual human beings for their services. Developing technology that could make AI NPCs truly useful and convincing would certainly be a huge investment, but the vague promise of cutting out voice actors, animators, and as many other workers as possible is apparently enough for multiple companies to justify the expense. In 2023, Microsoft’s partnership with Inworld to create AI NPCs similar to what Sony is now testing led to outcry among voice actors in particular, who are also still on strike to secure protections against AI-generated versions of their own voices being created without proper consent and compensation.
Even setting aside the ethical issues of a technology that could put untold numbers of people out of work, Sony’s demo made a poor impression on many developers who spoke out against it on social media. Josh Sawyer, director of Pentiment and Pillars of Eternity, called the idea of open-ended conversations with NPCs that aren’t actually related to the characters “generic and boring.” Ashley Cooper, a writer for Solace State and Space Marine II, said that the idea goes beyond boring to simply be poor game design.
“NPCs with one or two lines of dialog clearly communicate to the player that this character cannot help you progress,” Cooper wrote on Bluesky. “We don't just choose not to include thousands of lines for NPCs because we're lazy or lack resources. It's bad design.”
Cooper’s comments in particular point to one reason why these AI NPCs always feel so unsatisfying. Using generative AI to let NPCs respond to questions isn’t just unnecessary, it could actually make games worse. Games aren’t intended to be perfect simulations, and they shouldn’t be. They are, by and large, authored experiences that present the illusion of greater choice than they actually offer. Having NPCs with only a tiny number of dialogue lines isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s an integral part of how games work, and letting players get endlessly distracted by pointless conversations isn’t an improvement.
