Sony's on it again with another bizarre AI patent I'm not sure anybody rightly wants. Back in January, the company put forward a patent for a "ghost", which could play videogames for you if you were getting stuck.
This idea sucks, don't get me wrong—but it at least makes a certain kind of sense. If you're an executive that's never played a videogame before, you might think that the largest obstacle between your consumer and a bigger library is difficulty. The reality is that when I get a game I usually want to play it, but whatever. It's not like I've never used a guide from one of our hardworking guides writers. I can see the vision.
What I cannot fathom is why anybody would even think to want this latest patent, (spotted by VGC) beyond a brief bout of novelty. Sony's proposed AI-generated future involves "LLM-based generative podcasts for gamers". Oh boy.
The pitch is this: You boot up your console, which has "a large language model (LLM) to identify data associated with a video game player's profile" baked into it. You get a prompt to "generate a podcast of news related to the data, with the podcast presenting the news in a voice of a video game character of a video game played by the video game player."
As a video game player myself (familiar with the voices of many video game characters (of a video game)) I cannot imagine anything more offputting than hearing all the enthusiasm rendered out of a performance I am currently enjoying just so I can get told—actually, let's look at some of the examples from the patent.
"Jack Brown just won trophy 532 in Space Explorers. You should try your hand at that game!" says one hypothetical AI-generated news broadcaster. "Also, try a spin move on the boss next time!" says another.
And look—these are patent drawings, they're often very silly and just meant to meticulously depict a topic so blandly that it's beyond legal dispute. But it doesn't help pitch this idea for me to be reminded of that one infamous commercial where a QA tester reassures their boss that they've "just finished level three, and need to tighten up the graphics a little bit."
On the other hand, Kratos telling me to update my drivers before I boot up the game he's in while sitting behind a news desk does sound funny in principle, and I have no doubt that if this patent became a reality, plenty of folks would get a cheap novelty chuckle. Like that one AI-generated game where Snoop Dog plays a judge.
But also, like… god, doesn't this suck? Are we really sending voice acting industries into justified fury over their livelihood, often against the wishes of the voice actors themselves, all so Aloy can tell you to use a spin move? What are we doing, here?
Sure, we've invented the torment nexus, but Google can spin up a cheap, soulless knockoff of Breath of the Wild you can run around in for like 3 minutes. Spyro can tell you to git good. RAM's crazy expensive because we're building power-guzzling data centers in baffling locations, but one bright day in the future, we might have AI-generated podcasts for gamers. I need to take a nap.
