Gaming technology is ever-evolving, but one area that has lagged behind is the artificial intelligence used in games. While many games have hyped up their AI advancements, the end results have often fallen short, with bots that are easy to spot and dispatch. That’s why the limited-time Race Together experience in Gran Turismo 7 has been so impressive. For the first time, players can race against Sony’s GT Sophy AI, which has been years in the making and is unlike any other AI we’ve seen in gaming.
The experience of racing against GT Sophy is carefully crafted to play with your expectations. The races are on offer with multiple difficulty levels, starting you in an overpowered car compared to the AI racers before eventually offering a totally level playing field. And once you get up to that final level, GT Sophy’s sophistication is manifest in the form of a racer that is unpredictable and opportunistic like no other AI we’ve ever raced.
This isn’t just a simple system that makes the bot more or less aggressive – it’s a racer that reacts in real-time and spots opportunities to pull off moves that we didn’t even see. Even drivers who are a million times more experienced and skilled than us have found the AI hugely challenging to overcome. It drives like a player would, if that player were the most reliable and mistake-free driver on the circuit, and it’s amazing how revolutionary that can feel.
The question now is how it will impact the scene. Is this the future of practice racing, against a perfect machine that can push you to new heights? Or is it the death of competitive Gran Turismo, as people’s hopes are snuffed out by a Terminator-like chaser? Whatever the future holds, the fact that the AI is in Sony and Polyphony Digital’s own hands is a good sign, unlike in other games where third-party bots can infiltrate from the outside and crush competitive integrity.
The release of GT Sophy feels all the more timely, with AI implementations threatening the worlds of publishing and programming with AI-created scripts that are hard to pick out from authored content. For now, all we can recommend is that any racing fans seek out the Race Together event to try it for themselves. Getting destroyed by an AI is nothing new, but playing one that’s indistinguishable from an ace human driver leaves its own distinct glow of admiration. So why not take on GT Sophy and see if you’ve got what it takes to beat this revolutionary gaming AI?
