Palworld embroiled in AI drama
Known colloquially as Pokemon with guns, Palworld became an overnight success after launching on Friday.
Unfortunately, the game has become embroiled in controversy as people have begun speaking up about stolen designs, copyright issues and now, AI involvement.
Palworld has found itself deep in an AI controversy after only 24 hours
With approximately 2 million sales within 24 hours of launch, it is no wonder that people are talking about Palworld a lot.
Unfortunately, a lot of this conversation has centred around the game's probable use of AI, which has seemingly been used in other projects made by the same developer.
Pocketpair’s CEO Takuro Mizobe has previously praised the use of AI in video game design, and even has an entire game built around AI image generation.
One of the CEO’s old tweets from April 2023 was excited at the prospect of “true AI-powered games on gpt-4”.
Another tweet from November 2022, which feels especially relevant given the similarities to several pokemon, said: “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?”
Similarly, a third tweet from December 2021, showed several pictures of pokemon and AI-generated pokemon-like monsters and said: “The AI has evolved so much that I can no longer tell which one is a pokemon…”
Naturally, this doesn’t paint the best picture for the game.
While there is no hard evidence that Palworld itself was made with AI, it is clearly something that the CEO of the developer is interested in and has played around with before.
Similarly, some people have come forward to state that Pocketpair has previously promoted crypto and NFTs.
People are upset that the potential use of AI has gone unnoticed
At the time of writing, Palworld has received very positve reviews on Steam with only 7% of these reviews being negative.
Unsurprisingly, many people are upset that the potential use of AI in Palworld is being ignored by the huge player base.
“It’s kinda wild how much people will look away from this stuff if it’s something they like, especially right after all the talk about standing with creatives,” wrote one Twitter user.
Another said: “I'm sorry, Palworld devs support AI art and can go fuck themselves, AND I think some of the designs border on blatant plagiarism.”
“So many good projects out there and people choose to pay attention to the unholy abomination created if you smashed the worst pokemon designs and genshin impact together, all of that powered by AI”, commented a third.
Palworld has recently taken an effort to declare that it is not a scam, potentially in an attempt to get ahead of rumours like these.
Regardless, it would definitely be a better look for the developer to outwardly state that there is no AI in the game if it didn’t actually use any and, if they did, it may be a decision between sticking to your morals and being able to equip a knock-off Pikachu with an assault rifle.
