From GT7 to Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Sony’s PS AI push aims for smarter, more human games

According to VGC, SIE president Hideaki Nishino used Sony’s latest earnings briefing to unveil a new AI strategy for PlayStation, and the scope is much broader than a minor platform upgrade. Sony is positioning AI as a core tool across both game development and platform operations, with the stated goal of improving player experience and boosting production efficiency for developers.

What stands out most here is how Sony wants AI to help characters feel more alive, not just how it can speed up pipelines. The company highlighted two in-house tools in particular. One is “Mockingbird,” an animation tool that can quickly generate 3D facial animation from motion-capture data, compressing what used to take hours into something almost instant. The other is an AI hair-modeling tool that can rapidly create high-precision 3D hair models from live-action video. Sony says these technologies have already been adopted by teams including Naughty Dog, and have been used in shipped titles such as Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

That matters because facial expressions, hair, and tiny physical details are often where players form emotional connections with a character. Whether a player believes someone is sad, angry, or trying to hide it usually comes through subtle performance rather than dialogue alone. If AI can take over repetitive work in modeling, animation, QA, and 3D production, lower the barrier to creation, and shorten development cycles, then artists, animators, and performers have more room to focus on the emotional work that actually defines a scene.

The obvious concern, though, is whether AI starts replacing human creators. For story-heavy, character-driven games, that fear is justified: once emotional expression becomes standardized, polished presentation can still feel hollow. Sony’s response was unusually direct. The company said a game’s creative vision, design core, and emotional expression still depend on studio creators and performers, and that AI is only an assistive efficiency tool. I agree with that position, but it will only matter if it shows up in the games themselves rather than staying as earnings-call language.

On the player-facing side, Sony pointed to the AI driver in GT7, saying it gives hardcore players a deeper competitive experience. The company also said it has developed a personalized AI NPC prototype designed to give NPCs more independent personalities and help build more dynamic game worlds. That is an appealing direction. An NPC that can actually respond with some sense of identity is very different from one that just stands in place and delivers preset lines.

Sony also says AI has already been fully integrated into PlayStation platform operations. Through AI payment optimization and smart recommendations, the company says it has generated more than $700 million in incremental revenue. On the hardware side, the PS5 Pro’s PSSR upscaling technology uses machine learning to improve image quality and frame rate, and Sony says it has significantly upgraded the visuals of newer titles such as Saros Cycle. The strategy here is not a single-point breakthrough, but an end-to-end AI system spanning development, publishing, platform management, and personalized recommendations for games, play styles, memberships, and peripherals.

My view is that AI’s best role in games is not to take the pen from creators, but to remove the repetitive, mechanical, time-consuming work that slows teams down. It should help make characters more nuanced, worlds more responsive, and developers more capable of crafting a relationship, a farewell, or a moment of growth with care. If future AI NPCs really can add more layers to interaction, that would be meaningful progress. If AI only makes content faster while turning characters into standardized products, it will feel deeply off.

So my takeaway on Sony’s PlayStation AI strategy is cautiously positive. GT7 shows that AI can deepen gameplay, while Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered shows it is already part of real production pipelines. What decides whether this works will not be how much AI Sony deploys, but whether creators can still put characters who feel genuinely human into players’ memories.