PlayStation sees AI as a ‘powerful tool’ to help make games

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. Gaming GamingPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All Gaming AI AIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All AI News NewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All NewsPlayStation sees AI as a ‘powerful tool’ to help make gamesStudios like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio have already adopted an AI-powered animation tool. Studios like Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio have already adopted an AI-powered animation tool. by Jay Peters Jay PetersSenior ReporterPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

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FollowSee All by Jay PetersMay 8, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge Jay Peters Jay PetersPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

As part of an earnings presentation on Friday, Sony shared how it’s thinking about AI at the company, including many details about how it’s evaluating AI as part of making PlayStation games. Generative AI has recently been showing up in bigger games — though many indie developers still reject it — and while Sony calls AI a “powerful tool,” it says that the “vision, the design, and the emotional impact of our games will always come from the talent of our studios and performers. ” and that “AI is meant to augment their capabilities, not to replace them.

”At its own studios, Sony says that developers are “automating repetitive workflows, improving software engineering productivity, and accelerating areas like quality assurance, 3D modeling, and animation through new, AI-powered tools. ” One example is with a tool called “Mockingbird” that can animate 3D facial models using performance capture data, and Sony says that Mockingbird is finishing animation work that previously took hours in “a fraction of a second. ”The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog and God of War developer Santa Monica Studio are among those that have used the tool, and work from Mockingbird has shown up in titles including Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.

However, “we are not replacing human performers, but rather optimizing how we process the data from these live captures,” according to Sony. RelatedAI can’t make good video game worlds yet, and it might never be able toAI was everywhere at gaming’s big developer conference — except the gamesIn 2025, AI became a lightning rod for gamers and developersSony also says that it has partnered with Bandai Namco to “explore how Generative AI and the latest technologies can most effectively contribute to realizing a creator’s vision in the realm of video production.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.