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Struggling in that PS5 game? Don't worry, a ghost player trained on YouTube and Twitch will help you

Sony patented AI-generated video game tutorials this year, and it sounds like a nightmare

Photo: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Tutorials might well be the bane of the video game industry's existence. Teaching a player how to do something is surprisingly difficult to do. Even if a developer crafts an educational and entertaining tutorial, there's no telling whether the player will find it, try it, or pay enough attention to learn from it. When was the last time you actually used the PlayStation 5's built-in Game Help feature? Exactly. Perhaps this is why Sony has been exploring more ways to get players on the same page, this time with AI.

As spotted by Boing Boing, there's a Sony patent dating back to April that seems to have gone under the radar despite its curious premise. In it, Sony proposes the idea of "ghost assistance" where the game session connects to an artificial intelligence engine. That engine generates what Sony calls a "ghost character" who will basically show the player what needs to be done in that specific portion of the game.

"The interactive actions by the ghost character are configured to progress the ghost character along an interactive path of the game," the patent reads. Based on phrasing, it seems that players will need to have a specific mode turned on in order for any of this to trigger, which theoretically means that you can opt out of seeing random ghosts telling you what to do.

Players will also be able to control how much help the ghost AI actually provides. The AI might guide the player with an overlay of what needs to be done, or it could give the player examples of the specific button inputs needed to progress through the game. The ghost can hold an interactive conversation with the player using natural language, like you might when speaking to AI like Grok. And of course, the ghost can simply do whatever you need for you.

Now, it's worth keeping a few things in mind here. Though Sony repeatedly uses the word "AI," this does not necessarily mean that the feature will be similar to the controversial technology powering things like ChatGPT. But the wording of the patent certainly sounds like it. Sony specifies that the AI will be trained "from a plurality of training footage sources" that it will use to analyze live gameplay so it can offer the player contextual help. That footage can be based on previous playthroughs of the game generated by other users, both "in-network" and "out-of-network," as well as anything online that it might deem helpful, like social media posts or website descriptions. The patent also specifies that the game engine could be "distributed among a plurality of processing entities, each of which may reside on different server units of a data center."