[UPDATE - May 12, 2026] In a Corporate Earning Strategy Presentation, Sony CEO Hiroki Totoki and PlayStation CEO Hideaki Nishino have shared more details about their new AI-based strategy for PlayStation Studios.
[ORIGINAL STORY] Alongside the earnings report, Sony today is revealing a wide-ranging generative AI strategy built around a single guiding principle: AI augments human creativity; it doesn't replace it. Speaking at the FY25 earnings presentation, Sony Group CEO Hiroki Totoki said:
Human creativity must remain at the center. AI is a powerful tool, but is not a replacement for artists or creators. It is an amplifier of human imagination and catalyst for new possibilities.
Sony Pictures has already invested more than $50 million in AI capabilities covering production planning, content protection, enterprise productivity, data analytics, innovation, and 3D conversion. Sony Music is pursuing an industry-wide standard for labeling AI-generated content, aiming to provide transparency to consumers while protecting IP rights with licensing partners. Today, Sony also announced a collaborative initiative with Bandai Namco to explore generative AI in video production. The two companies have already identified "massive gains in speed and productivity per person" and have surfaced key weaknesses: current models lack consistency and controllability, which creators require. Sony has developed workarounds using fine-tuned models built on proprietary data to generate reliable, stylistically accurate output at commercially viable costs.
But what's more interesting to us is that PlayStation CEO Nishino Hideaki detailed how AI is specifically reshaping Sony's first-party studios. The push is broad and already deployed in released titles, though the executive did not clarify which ones.
- Mockingbird is an internal tool that generates facial animations from performance capture data in a fraction of the traditional time. It was already adopted at Naughty Dog and San Diego Studio, including on shipped games. San Diego Studio just released MLB The Show 26, so that could be the first Sony-published game to use the technology.
- An AI hair animation tool converts video footage of real hairstyles into strand-level 3D models, eliminating what was previously one of the most labor-intensive processes in character art.
- Wider studio automation across first-party PlayStation developers now covers repetitive workflows, software engineering productivity, QA acceleration, and 3D modeling.
Hideaki added:
Our goal is always to be the best place to play and the best place to publish. We see AI as a powerful tool to help us in this mission.
Sony might be the biggest game publisher to openly adopt AI tools in game development. There's been a lot of talk in the industry recently about the subject, especially after the backlash Larian Studios faced when it revealed how it was using AI for its upcoming game, Divinity.
The studio then announced that it will not use AI-powered concept art during game development, but will still use the technology in other areas. That's essentially what CAPCOM admitted in late March. After all, every developer and publisher is looking for ways to make their work more efficient, and AI tools show great promise in that regard.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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