In March we reported thatSony was experimenting with AI models of some of its most popular characters. Aloy fromHorizon Forbidden Westwas the chosen subject for this experiment, with a model of the character having a conversation with someone. While it was merely an internal tech demo, Sony using AI to mimic one of its flagship characters did not go down well with people, including actor Ashly Burch herself.
At the time,Burch responded to the news, saying, “I feel worried. Not worried about Guerrilla specifically, or Horizon, or my performance, or my career specifically, even. I feel worried about this art form. Game performance as an art form.” Some time has passed since then and we haven’t heard anything about Sony’s experiment. However, Burch said in a recent interview that there are some use cases for AI in games development, but there would need to be protections as well.
The Use of AI In Game Development Needs To Be A Conversation
“For me, I think that AI as a tool to make things easier on devs would be a great thing,” said Burch in a conversation with Eurogamer. “Like, I think I’ve heard someone say before something like, ‘oh, if we used artificial intelligence to help with clean up between the mo-cap stage and importing it into the actual game engine, that could be amazing’. So, things that help streamline the development process [and] help make people’s jobs easier, I think is great.”
However, “in terms of if someone asked me ‘can we make a replica of you that players could interact with ad nausium’,” Burch would “really have to know how [the developer] was going to protect against me saying something awful”. The best example of this would beFortnite’s AI-driven Darth Vader, and howfans made him say some really wild things.
Burch continued to say that while AI has a lot of use cases in development, it’s a different conversation when AI starts taking over people’s jobs – in this case, that of actors. Implementing it “would have to be a conversation” with all parties.
“It’s such a new technology, so it’s difficult to know what applications developers would want to use it for,” she continued. “Guerrilla really cares about performance in its games, and I think a universe where Guerrilla just replaces every single actor they have with a robot is not going to happen.”
