Pocketpair’s Palworld has faced further allegations of using AI within their record-breaking game, after old tweets have resurfaced from the CEO regarding using AI to create Pokemon lookalikes and avoiding copyright infringement.
Palworld has shocked the gaming community since it released. It remarkably surged to the top of the Steam charts and has broke records by peaking at over 1 million concurrent players in just a few days.
However, the survival-based game that instantly got the nickname “Pokemon with guns” has been constantly hit with waves of backlash regarding claims of “plagiarism”. This has not just been with Pokemon, but also over similar games of Ark and Rust.
Palworld’s main and arguably the most questionable case in regards to “copying” surrounds the Pals in the game. They have sent the internet into a frenzy over their distinct likeness to various Pokemon, and now many believe that “evidence” proves they are being created with the use of AI.
In particular, Palworld’s CEO Takuro Mizobe’s old tweets that have resurfaced surrounding AI and Pokemon, as well as how they believed that one day AI would be capable of avoiding copyright infringement.
Palworld players convinced “evidence” shows Pals are being created with AI
Many gamers and players of the game have spoken out and made side-by-side comparisons with many Pals in the game and the different Pokemon across socials.
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However, it is Pocketpair’s own CEO Takuro Mizobe, who has came underfire after a series of old tweets going back to 2021 have resurfaced.
“The AI has evolved so much that I can no longer tell which one is a Pokemon,” the tweet read from their official Twitter/X account, which was paired alongside various Pokemon and AI-generated lookalikes.
here's the CEO of Pocketpair talking about using AI to bypass copyright, generating fakemons with it, calling AI: Art Imposter a real-time image generation game, and being excited for games powered by GPT-4 pic.twitter.com/79xwZr0yEI
— Zaytri 🍉 (@imZaytri) January 19, 2024
Fast forward to November 28, 2022, they tweeted: “If you pass it through the filter of AI, the image is often not of a specific thing, so maybe the copyright issue will be resolved?” Before ending with: “In about 30 years, the general public’s perception of copyright may have changed considerably.”
Backlash has since flooded in regarding the tweets, as one user has commented: “I was super excited to jump into Palworld but all the evidence I’m seeing makes it pretty probable that the game is using AI generative imaging to create the designs for their monsters.”
While others have highlighted that Pocketpair’s “AI: Art Imposter” game already has been shown “utilizing an AI image generator” in the game itself, as well as including AI generated assets. At the time of writing, Pocketpair and CEO Takuro Mizobe has not adressed the claims that AI is being used in Palworld.
