Summary
Earlier this year, Asad Qizilbash, head ofPlayStation Productionsand product at PlayStation Studios,said that AIis “important for the younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, who are the first generations that grew up digitally and are looking for personalization across everything, as well as looking for experiences to have more meaning.” It’s a controversial topic that could force game developers out of work and has subsequently led tostrike action by SAG-AFTRA-represented voice actors.
Sonyhasn’t been put off by the potential controversy, though. The company is seemingly about to push into AI, as Sony Interactive Entertainment has just posted a job advert for a “staff machine learning engineer.”
PlayStation’s New Staff Machine Learning Engineer Role
The new role, posted onLinkedIn, is looking for someone to design, implement, and optimize “novel machine learning models and algorithms to perform challenging and diverse tasks.”
The machine learning models will be deployed in “production environments” and will help with “solving issues and ensuring performance.”
Sony is fully committing to AI in this role, with the successful candidate needing a master’s degree and 6+ years in the machine learning field. They will be expected to prototype new ideas and technologies and “Contribute to the authorship of team research papers, presenting at relevant conferences.”
Sony’s 2024 Struggles
If I were being cynical, I might suggest that Sony is looking to replace some of the approximately 1,000 jobs it has made redundant at PlayStation this year with AI tools, given that the role is also looking at “ensuring scalability.”
In February,Sony laid off 900 workersacross its network. This “restructuring” also saw the shuttering of PlayStation Studios' London Studio and thereported cancelationof various games, including the Twisted Metal live-service title. A few months later, while CEOPete Parsons kept his exotic car collection,DestinystudioBungielaid offover 200 staff, adding to theredundancies it made in late 2023.
These layoffs led a former PlayStation boss to claim thatcorporate greed wasn’t to blameand that laid-off workers should “drive an Uber” or “find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”
Despitenegative fan sentimentover the$700 priceand lack of a disc drive, Sony will be hoping that thePlayStation 5 Procan turn the company’s fortunes around when it releases later this year.
PS5
The PS5 is Sony’s premier gaming console launched in 2020, and it comes with both a standard and digital-only version.
