Sony's latest patent filing sketches out AI agents trained directly on your gameplay habits so they can handle the tedious grinds, story progressions, and boss fights while you do literally anything else. The document, published last month but filed back in 2022, goes further than their earlier "ghost player" idea by explicitly describing how one player's detailed user data could be licensed or sold to another for cash—famous players included.

This isn't hypothetical hand-waving. The filing spells out mechanisms for payments when a user A pulls training data from another user, turning personal playstyles into tradable assets. Combine that with Sony's track record of patents that eventually surface in products and you have a clear path toward commodifying the hours people sink into games.

Patents are cheap speculation until they're not. The real concern isn't whether this exact system ships tomorrow—it's that the infrastructure for AI babysitters and data marketplaces is being mapped out in plain sight while the industry keeps pretending player time and habits aren't already being harvested at scale.