i gotta stop scrolling through the palworld tumblr/twitter search holy shit my brain is rotting.

Palworld did not use AI in it's designs oh my god. the initial trailer for the game dropped in 2021, before AI art generation really kicked off into high-gear, and you can see many designs there that are finalized for the final game. You can look at the original trailer here. No doubt that many other creature designs were also finalized during this time.

Additionally, lets also look at what AI pokemon actually DID look like at the time:

... these look absolutely nothing like palworld designs. palworld designs are very deliberate "pokemon but legally distinct" or "two pokemon mashed together", wheras these are an amalgamation of all the pokemon available at the time. if anyone remembers the melty surreal AI of the time, you know there's no way to ask it to give you a "normal type lycanroc" and have it produce direhowl's design.

I also feel like this whole discourse around accusing the team of using AI for their monster designs does a disservice to the completely original designs in the game? because believe it or not, there are a lot of wholly unique designs in this game! my personal favorites so far being Tombat, Swee, and Caprity.

if it turns out that everything truly was AI generated then that's egg on my face. you're allowed to have your opinions on the plagiarism of palworld's monster designs, but don't go around spreading false information you read online just because it sounds true and makes the game look worse.

The Age Old Debate: Fire Good, or Fire Bad?

This was originally going to be part of this thread, but the points were distinct enough and my thoughts rambly enough that I split it into two posts.

From the recent PalWorld thread:

We gotta handle that last tag in two parts.

Part 1 "the devs admitted to using AI art to make the pals"

First off, that isn't true near as I can tell. I can't find anything of the PalWorld Devs admitting they used AI for PalWorld designs. Palworld had demo footage with Pals in it 2 years ago on June 6 with their announcement trailer, which means they would have had to have started dev much earlier than that.

This is what AI art from June of 2022 looked like:

On the left, Hieronymus Bosch's Pokemon, on the right, Charmander on Gumby.

I did a much deeper breakdown of the "used AI" accusation here. It does not hold water.

Now, I could change my mind on this point if there were linked evidence to the creators of Palworld saying this. But there isn't.

Because the accusation is repeated in a tag, there's no way to include supporting information, or even to easily directly ask the accuser for it. Many people are going to see it, internalize it, and then repeat it uncritically, and that's how rumors and witchhunts start.

Because I've seen a lot of accusations about PalWorld stealing fakemon, and I'm yet to see a smoking gun. There's barely smoke.

Gonna hit the second point in that tag, but while we're on the theme of spreading misinfo:

Part 2 of the Tag: Using AI to Brainstorm is "Bad"

This is also an assertion that would require support, and I believe it to be wholly incorrect.

Plagiarism happens at publication. Not at inception, not inspiration, not even at the production level. The only measure of whether something is or is not "stolen art" is whether what comes out at the end replicates, with insufficient transformation, an existing, fixed expression. Art theft is about what comes out, not about what goes in.

For more about how this works with AI art, I suggest checking out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's statement on the issue. They're the ones looking out for your online civil rights, and I agree with their position on this.

The argument that AI art is theft because it is trained on public-facing material on the internet just doesn't fly. Those are all fixed published works subject to inspiration, study, and transformative recreation under fair use. The utilization of mechanical apparatus does not change that principle.

And fair use that requires permission isn't fair use. That's a license.

Moreover, altering the process to put infringement at inspiration/input or allowing the copyrighting of styles would be the end of art as we know it.

There's no coincidence that the main legal push against AI art on copyright grounds is backed by Adobe and Disney. Adobe is already using AI art as a pretext to lobby congress to let them copyright styles, and Disney owns enough material on its own to produce a dataset that would let them do all the AI they'd ever need to, entirely with material they "own." And they're DOING THAT.

The genie is out of the bottle, they (Disney, Adobe, Warner Bros, Universal) have it, and it can't be taken away from them. They just don't want anyone else using AI to compete with them.

Palworld didn't use AI to conceive of its critters. If it had, they'd have probably been less derivative.

(three random AI fakemon I prompted up as examples of just that)

Both traditional and AI-assisted art can plagerize or be original, its entirely based upon how the techniques are used.

Moreover, you can infringe entirely accidentally without realizing, but you can also fail at copying enough that it becomes a new protected work.

We're well into moral panic territory with AI in general, and there's more than a touch of it around Palworld, largely because people aren't suspicious enough of information that confirms their worldview.

I used the quoted set of tags as the prompt for the top of the post, all the AI images in this post are unmodified and were not extensively guided, and thus do not meet the minimal expression threshold and should be considered in the public domain.

Honestly if anything, I really hope that Palworld makes developers realize that monster collecting games can be more than just JRPGs. I've played a whole lot of these other monster collection games that people recommend (Yo-kai Watch, Digimon, Monster Hunter Stories, Fossil Fighters, etc) and despite how much I love monster collecting games... I'm burnt out on RPGs! I want something new to the genre, and I think THAT is why Palworld appeals to me so much.

Like, what would a platformer monster collector look like? A metroidvania? A soulslike?? THIS is the door I want Palworld to open. I know GameFreak isn't threatened by this game at all, they're not gonna improve because of it. But I DO want it to inspire indie devs to think outside the box.

i think the palworld thing is really interesting- because so far, there's no proof that the company used AI to make their mons

the real reason everyone is up in arms is because of the plagiarism thing, and like, idk, genuinely, do we care?

like does it matter?

it's game freak, they'll walk it off. people who like pokemons like them mostly out of brand loyalty. they like pokemons because they're pokemons, they don't just like cute monsters.

i'm sorry but i think it's fine if you want to make a game where legally distinct pikachu kills people with a 1911. i don't actually give a shit. like litterally why are we defending Pokemons, they're fine, they can shoot lasers and whatnot.

plagiarism matters when people are harmed. game freak is not people, and frankly, I don't think any of this will harm them.

one thing you can and should call palworld, however, is derivative. it lacks any sort of imagination. wether AI or not was used matters little: it's definitely just trying to make Content with a snappy concept and that's it. it's not worth your time not because of the tools that MIGHT have been used to make it, but because even if each of these mons had been painstakingly designed by hand with a graphite pencil, they'd still just be trying to ape pokemons. the intent would be the same regardless.

Pocketpair isn't the next Sommerton.

personally I am very turned off by the concept of a mon' catcher where you shoot & kill the monsters. That said, I also don't personally see the validity of the "plagiarism" accusations. From what I've seen, most of the monster designs are fairly unique & the actual gameplay is obviously substantially different. Theres a couple designs I'd say are obvious homages (the luxray like in particular) but for the most part similarities tend to be like, oh thats a sheep. Yeah thats what sheep look like. Not really plagiarizing from pokemon as much as... god?

someone in my gaming discord: palworld is unethical! you can enslave pals and work them to literal death! it's true, i saw my friend do it!

me and my friends: if anything, that just sounds like your friend is playing like an asshole

like. not only did i not know you could do that, because i have a chicken home shaped like a literal chicken and im playing a slice of life cheeky chooks over here, but i didnt know someone literally did all that they could to make their pals suffer.

like, it seems like your friend intentionally wanted to play the game as cruel as possible, and it's not a mandatory way to play the game. just a choice your friend decided to make.

but then, even if the game forced you do to unethical decisions/actions, it's.. just a game?

if you dont like it, move on and ignore it. but dont act like you have 'fictional ethics superiority' when you play games like war/combat games, dark themed games, or survival horror games because then you just look silly.

"Palworld critics are just corporate bootlickers for Nintendo" Nobody is fucking defending Nintendo's property rights. The point is that the company behind Palworld not only has shown support of generative AI and their previous titles have been a Frankenshit monster of other popular games. Craftopia used bought assets which is fine in the indie game scene so long as the rights to those assets allow commercial use, but that shows that the studio likely doesn't have the manpower and creative power to truly make their own. Another game I enjoy, Garden Paws, was made by a dev studio of two people and a musician. It's a decently large game based off Animal Crossing, but manages to still be enjoyable and stand on it's own. All art is derivative, but there's a difference between taking inspiration from something, and straight up trying to pull directly from it for personal gain. WoW and FFxiv are both tab-target mixed fantasy MMORPGs, but WoW is not FFxiv and FFxiv is not WoW, and while FFxiv was inspired by elements of WoW and other MMORPGs, the passion and commitment the dev team has put into this game has allowed it to stand on its own and be as successful as it is. Pokemon spawned an entire subgenre of monster collecting, and each individual franchise has made it's own spin on things, which is how some of them have survived for two decades or more. Palworld is- as someone on Twitter put it- "creatively bankrupt" and exists as "profits over passion". There are some monster designs- like that Serperior looking thing, or the one with Galarian Meowth's -exact- face, or the belt and arms on the Cinderace-but-grass-type that are -directly- pulled from Pokemon. So... it's either a case of generative AI which the devs are being dishonest about (as Steam requires studios to disclose AI use), or their artist simply doesn't care about plagiarism (and, miss me with the 'but parody' business, the game isn't close enough to actual Pokemon to be a true parody, it's, again, a Frankenshit Monster of Pokemon, ARK, and the currently popular Blizz/Fortnite/etc art style). If this game actually tried to be its own thing, had its own artstyle, it could truly be something of it's own, but the game and the studio's other titles are really nothing but a "lets see how many popular things we can capitalize on to make a profit". AI use or not, it's kind of disturbing that such a game can get as many sales as it did. Like it pisses me off, personally, but I'm not terribly worried about it because if the devs are this devoid of any genuine love for their IPs (and they did kinda dump Craftopia to focus on this) it's likely going to fall to the wayside and be relegated to a FotM title when they can't push enough new content to keep it interesting.

Palworld

...

1- Upscaling a model uniformly is not LYING. It doesn't change the proportions or model makeup. Numerous 3D modelers, all whom expressed disinterest in modern Pokemon, came out and explained this.

2-The 'i am doing this because Palworld glorifies animal abuse' comment doesn't mean they were lying. You should be skeptical yes but it's not lying. Even the account that said this gotv deleted BECAUSE what they said was so wrong.

3- The people proclaiming that did so BEFORE what Byofrog said all that, all based around designs not models.

4- I literally explained that they legitimately thought that theft HAD occurred and were PRAISING it. So your point was ultimately fruitless.

5- You clearly can't read though because I outright fucking said 'DO not start shit on this post, leave your complaints in my inbox.' Simple ass instructions for the sake of not derailing a post- couldn't even follow that.

1. And other modelers said that the model makeup was different.

Having gotten my hands on the models as well, I'm inclined to agree.

2. The sort of twat who believes fiction is reality does not deserve the benefit of the doubt. People like that lie constantly and I had no inclination to believe byofrog was different. If something had come out in the time since, I wouldn't have said they were lying.

3. Yes, they were talking about designs, specifically hysteria about ai art(something that Pokemon stans accused Cassette Beasts of as well) and accusations of stealing designs from fakemon artists, two things that turned out to be completely untrue, and which ultimately poisoned the well regarding further accusations.

4a. The stupidity and unprincipled behavior of others does not make your hysterical whining about the death of creativity valid.

4b. The only reason they were acting like this is because it's GameFreak and Nintendo, I have yet to see a similar occurrence. If this were like Deviator ripping assets wholesale from Hollow Knight, I doubt anyone would try justifying it. For the record I don't approve of such things.

5. You are not the op, so I don't have to care for your rules. And you absolutely do not get to whine about starting shit, when you are starting shit over a two-month old controversy that did nothing but make Pokemon fans look unhinged. Thanks for that, by the way.

Pull your head out of your ass and stop acting like rwde.

this week's video discussing whether or not palworld stole pokemon's art style is now live!!

not for nothing, but around 2021 the CEO of the studio behind palworld was tweeting about ai generated pokemon designs, and how he “can almost not tell the difference,” referencing that exact article, actually. I do not think every single design was ai generated or that any ai references were used from start to finish with no human touch, but the CEO is very openly interested in ai technology and its applications in game development! I don’t think its a stretch to guess it may have been used somewhere in the pipeline. and as someone who also messed around with fakemon generators when the tech was still a bit novel, some of the designs do have that ai stink to them, even from around that time.

yeah i chose that article specifically bc i knew that the CEO had referenced it in a tweet. I WANTED to get into it in the post, but it was also 9am and I hadn't gotten a wink of sheep that night (... bc i was up all night playing palworld WHOOPS--) (im writing this off a 2 hour nap so pls forgive me if it's incomprehensible)

I remember the whole "palworld used ai to gen its monsters" narrative literally started because someone qrt'd someone pointing out that CEO's tweet and extrapolated that because the CEO spoke positively on AI generated pokemon, then the game MUST have AI generated monster designs which... wasn't what the original tweet was saying at all. but unfortunately nuance and reason is like poison to twitter so the speculation spiraled from there. (not like tumblr is much better. but I at least have the space to explain myself here, however poorly that may be :P)

And like, the unfortunate thing is that nearly /every/ CEO is interested in AI. their whole job is to make money, not art. some are just louder about it than others. with the insane crunch that the pokemon developers go through, I wouldn't be surprised if AI is also used in those games somewhere in the pipeline, whether that's in the past or a future release.

Let's also not forget when the pokemon company international was interested in hiring simeone with knowledge in NFT/web3 technology. if we're automatically assuming that open interest in something means that it's implemented, or that it will be at some point, then we better get to boycotting pokemon now!

I wanna be clear that I'm not defending the use of AI art in game development. it may very well be that AI /was/ used somewhere in the Palworld pipeline. I just don't want people to be asserting something as true with little to no actual evidence. ever since I got "called out" by an ex-friend of mine for some heinous shit that i quite literally never did, I've been a lot more diligent in figuring out if something people are freaking out about on social media IS actually true, or if it was a mountain made out of a molehill, as it tends to be 99% of the time.

(btw I'm curious as to what pals you think have that AI stink to them? im generally trying to avoid spoilers for later game pals bc i wanna discover them on my own, but if you wanna send a list or something that I can look up when im further in the game I'd be interested.)

"Why is Palworld so AWESOME?!?!"

Maybe because it stole its entire identity from ARK and Pokemon so the team didn't have to do pesky things like 'being creative' or 'putting in effort'? Then again, not like you humiliated yourself being a blind dumbass before.

BTW Palworld fans are jumping onboard Pokemon. At least one reddit user admitted to this. How's that 'Pokemon Killer' with no real identity beyond 'Pokemon knock-off' working for you?

And I oop-

Tbh if anything DOES come out of this, im hoping its just gonna be TPC forcing some Pal design changes/model updates because... yeah no a lot of Pals are pretty egregious with their "inspiration". As funny as I think it is to have bootleg Lucario and Zoroark(s) running around, there's also Pals like the infamous Azurobe that literally have the body of a Serperior and hair of a Primarina. Like, come on now. Y'all really didn't need to reference the base Pokemon THAT heavily. It's basically traced but... in 3D.

I just wanna put this into the Tumblr world: If you genuinely believe palworld has done something wrong, please don't forget: The Pokemon Company has lawyers. Nintendo has lawyers. Nintendo also likes to shut down passionate fan projects. TPC and Nintendo are both cool with putting out shitty, unpolished Pokemon games that cost $90.

I am not defending Pocketpair as a helpless wittle indie dev. I just think the game they made is really funny and actually fun to play. And nobody needs to be a keyboard warrior for f u c k i n g NINTENDO

People yelling about plagiarism is really fucking funny to me. What did you guys think happened to PETA when they made Pokemon Black and Blue? I'm pretty sure it was nothing. Harris mentioned that Brillo is an exceptional example. Pocketpair would have to make a Very similar Pikachu for TPC to care enough to send a cease and desist for IP theft. Weird green cinderace and luxray? That will not affect pokemon's profits. None of this will. Stop bootlicking and play a fun game.

It is very difficult to explain to non-artists why artists might not like the palworld-pokemon situation, so here is an example with Stardew Valley

Stardew Valley is a game made by a single developer, Eric Barone, who had little to no artistic experience when he created it.

He went through several phases of sprites when working on the game and developing his style.

I won't pretend that any of SV's individual sprites are 100% unique, first person in the world to do them, but they have a distinct style and are cohesive and together it builds a distinct picture. They're saturated, there's that bright yellow pathing, the trees have that dense leaf cover, and so on.

ConcernedApe started developing another game, Haunted Chocolatier, and you can tell it has a similar style:

And now here is a game that was embroiled in a controversy several years ago, because, well:

This is "Super Zoo Story", a game produced by a different indie publisher, not ConcernedApe, which a lot of people immediately flagged as looking, well, exactly like a Stardew Valley mod.

Does Eric Barone own the concept of pixel art? No! Does he own the concept of farming sims (or Zoo sims)? No! Is it disrespectful, uncreative, and rude for people to so closely mimic his developed artstyle that it looks like he is associated with the project? Yes. it is.

And are there people who have been inspired by Stardew Valley who made similar games that actually have unique aesthetics? YES.

^Above, Kynseed, another pixel art farming RPG.

^Above, Fields of Mistria, an adorable farming sim with a cute pixel art style that is clearly inspired by games like Stardew Valley but which has a unique artstyle!

Now, I will say, Super Zoo Story has really evolved in art style, and I hope that part of that was reaction to criticisms for blatantly copying the style of Stardew Valley. I genuinely think they've done a great job improving their style and I wish them the best (very tempting to play it someday because I love zoos and stardew valley).

So here's the thing: I don't care if Pokemon "the company" gets stolen from. Pokemon will be fine, there are 12,000 monster games out there already. But normalizing and rewarding that type of really obvious stylistic theft is... it's bad for artists, and it's bad for art. It's bad for indie devs like ConcernedApe, who're getting people piggybacking off of his success.

Games like Ooblets, another monster-collecting game, actually has its own aesthetic. Cassette Beasts is even more obviously Pokemon and a lot of its characters look like they're fakemon but... the thing is they look like FAKEmon, not 1-to-1 with pokemon,

Anyways, I don't really care if people like the game Palworld, but I hate that it's so clearly low-effort in terms of graphics that I can't help but personally dislike it.

I know there are people who are getting tired of the discourse (I'm one of them), but as I was about to sleep I just realized something.

The palworld discourse is pretty similar to the "Genshin copied Botw" discourse.

It's not 50:50 since Genshin didn't have the ai allegations when it was first released, but the plagiarism allegations are there. With some of Palworld's designs being very much a look-alike of some pokemon designs while Genshin has gliding, stamina, map ui, and (few) enemy designs that can be seen in Botw. Two indie games (yes Hoyoverse counts as one, despite being very rich they're still a private company that publishes their own games) that have plagiarism allegations to Nintendo properties.

From what I've seen, both Genshin and Palworld hit a niche that hasn't been capitalized on and they would be the first successful ones to do so. Palworld hitting an "Ark Survival with Factorio gameplay and Pokemon designs" niche and Genshin hitting an "Open World Botw(-like) Action RPG Gacha game" niche. Both in a way revolutionary as most Fakemon games are not 3d open world survival games and most gacha games are 2d turned based games. This adds to the popularity as they don't have any close competition to both game niches

I'm sure people don't think that it contributed to each game's popularity, but the hate behind Palworld and Genshin actually increases people's awareness for the game and so it brings more people in to try the game and see if what they hear (whether it's positive or negative) is true or not. To quote a certain phrase “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." To really kill a game's popularity, people have to stop giving a shit about the games in general (both positive and negative).

So this is where I say that the discourse is a nothing burger and that the hate, ironically, is making the games more popular.

Unlike Palworld, who's first trailer debut was 2 years ago and just started releasing it, it's been over 4-6 years since Genshin was made and then released and it's has a lot more differences with Botw now that there's a lot more content. Since it's still early access, some designs in Palworld may be changed or that there will be more added original fakemon designs that the similarities between that and Pokemon is thinning out.

So if you don't like the design, send an email to the company. At least they'll be more encouraged to change designs than hearing glimpses of it in the internet. And if it's still not enough, why not make a game similar to Palworld instead of complaining in the internet. This is a niche genre that Palworld has people itching for more and that there will most likely be future games following suit like it's the California Gold rush.

Tldr: Both games hit a profitable niche and hate brings more eyes on them.