As reported by All About AI, in 2025 Sony was granted a patent for an AI-generated ghost player that can help you out when you're stuck. (Sony applied for the patent in 2023; these things take time.) The patent proposes an in-game interface that accepts "natural language queries" to identify which bit of the game you're stuck on, and then can either show you how to overcome the obstacle or take over and do it for you. I guess via possession?

The "ghost character" who provides "ghost assistance" will be based on footage of other players, presumably scraped from YouTube by AI. There's already a Game Help feature on Playstation 5 that can bring up relevant videos when you're stuck, and this seems like a less jarring implementation of that.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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