Have you ever sat down and thought about how you’d like a podcast hosted by Kratos telling you about all the cool games you could be buying and playing on the PlayStation Store? Me neither, but it seems someone at Sony did, as the company has been granted a patent for AI-generated podcasts starring PlayStation characters as a kind of bespoke marketing tool to target players’ specific interests.
The patent (thanks, VGC) was granted to Sony last month, and is called “LLM-Based Generative Podcasts for Gamers.” The company applied for the patent back in July 2024, long before we saw some of the other AI-generated performance tech Sony had been working on with the leaked tech demo of an AI-powered Aloy from Horizon in 2025.
“Video game platforms currently lack the ability to provide unique and targeted content to gamers to update the gamers about things that are happening on the platform,” the patent reads. “There are currently no adequate solutions to the foregoing computer-related, technological problem.”
Sony’s idea to combat this made-up problem is to create a daily AI-generated podcast in which characters like Parappa the Rapper, Ellie, or Jin Sakai give you recaps on your gameplay and updates on games that are out or on the way. This is framed as another way of personalizing the experience, as the character who reads off the marketing copy might be one from a game you’ve played recently, and would pull from your recent play history and friends list to cater the generated podcast to you. Examples in the patent include having someone like Nathan Drake tell you about your friends getting the Platinum in a game and recommending it to you, or having Ratchet keep you posted about patches and updates for the games you’re playing. The characters may also roast you for eating shit in your favorite game.
Companies patent things that never actually come to be all the time, and considering how much legal red tape you’d need to get past to use actors’ performances to train these models on, along with SAG-AFTRA having recently negotiated AI guardrails into its contract requiring actors to opt into such arrangements, I have a hard time seeing this ever come to fruition. Even so, this is just another example of a company trying to shoehorn AI into its products to solve problems that don’t exist. Turning your beloved characters into AI slop is another way of diluting your brand, one that Sony has spent the better part of a decade crafting an image of prestige around. I can’t imagine why the company would fuck that up and damage relationships with actors wary of AI being used to replace them, all for so little benefit.