Image: PlayStation via J-Soul on ResetEra
Sony is the latest organisation to be taken to task for appearing to make use of AI generated artwork.
Fortunately, this doesn’t relate to a game, and is instead part of an advent calendar promotion which appears to be targeting Canadian, German, French, and Dutch gamers primarily.
As of yet, we’ve not seen any reference of it on the primary PlayStation social media accounts, or the PS Blog.
The advent calendar itself is a fairly straight forward marketing tool, encouraging you to complete simple surveys and promotional activities in order to earn tickets, which you can then spend on a raffle in order to be in with a chance of winning a Ghost of Yotei DualSense or PS Plus Premium subscription.
But every time you enter the raffle you’ll get a free avatar every day, which appears to feature artwork generated by AI.
While it’s becoming increasingly difficult to detect AI artwork, we will say these avatars do have that kind of “look” to them, although there aren’t any obvious telltale signs like extra fingers or anything like that.
Perhaps the biggest giveaway is the use of Japanese writing in a cyberpunk-style scene, which don’t really reflect real characters at all.
On the grand scheme of things, this isn’t as bad as the recent examples of generative AI we’ve seen in Call of Duty and Fortnite – it is just a promotional activity, after all.
But Sony is sitting upon terabytes of cool concept art from dozens of franchises it actually owns. Couldn’t it have just cropped some of those to make more interesting avatars here?
[source advent.playstation.com, via resetera.com]
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As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to them, and is a bit of a gacha whale.