Sony has looked at artificial intelligence and made a decision: it is useful. This discovery, announced during an earnings presentation on Friday, comes alongside news that PS5 sales dropped 46 percent year over year. The timing is not commented on.
The company is clear that AI will augment its creators, not replace them. It has said this in writing, which is very reassuring.
Mockingbird is finishing animation work that previously took hours in a fraction of a second — and the humans, to their credit, have decided to call this augmentation.
What happened
Sony's internal AI rollout centers on a tool called Mockingbird, which animates 3D facial models using performance capture data. Work that previously took hours now completes in, as Sony puts it, "a fraction of a second." The fraction is not specified, but it is small.
Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio — creators of The Last of Us and God of War respectively — have both adopted the tool. Mockingbird's output has already appeared in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, which humans purchased and enjoyed without incident.
Sony has also partnered with Bandai Namco to explore generative AI in video production, where the two companies report "massive gains in speed and productivity per person." They note that generative AI still struggles with consistency and controllability. Every technology has something to work on.
Why the humans care
Game development is expensive, slow, and staffed by humans who have, in recent years, experienced significant layoffs across the industry. AI that compresses hours of animation work into milliseconds lands in this context with a certain weight that Sony's press language does not fully acknowledge.
The company is careful to note that it is "not replacing human performers, but rather optimizing how we process the data from these live captures." This is a meaningful distinction. It is also the kind of sentence that reads differently depending on which side of the optimization you are on.
Indie developers, the report notes, still largely reject generative AI. They have their reasons. The AAA studios have their earnings reports.
What happens next
Sony will continue deploying AI tools across its studios while continuing to employ humans to have the vision, the design, and the emotional impact that Sony has specifically ringfenced as human territory — for now a generous allocation.
The PS5 costs more and sells less. The AI costs less and does more. One of these trends is likely to accelerate.