Palworld AI and Plagiarism Controversy Explained

The monster-collecting adventure game, Palworld, has officially launched in Early Access, but not without controversy. Its similarities to Pokemon are undeniable, straight from its monster designs that have even called plagiarism into question. One of its highest and most prolific controversies, however, is the developers’ ties to AI and the question of whether or not generative AI was used in the development of Palworld.

Pocketpair’s ties to AI

Artificial intelligence is a controversial subject, not just in game development and art, but in content creation in general. While often used to cut costs or churn out content, a heavy concern surrounding generative AI is its potential to create plagiarized content. There’s also a human element to the controversy — will AI push out human creators and artists? It’s all very muddled, but regardless, the popular sentiment seems to be using AI to assist, not create and replace altogether.

Well, due to the suspicious nature of some of Palworld’s designs, the Internet mobilized rather quickly and discovered that the CEO of Pocketpair has excitedly talked about AI in the past to “bypass copyright, [generate] Fakemons,” and even the potential for games to be run by GPT-4. (The CEO reportedly has ties to cryptocurrency as well, a whole separate issue altogether.) Twitter user Zaytri posted extensively about this issue, although she also pointed out that this doesn’t necessarily indicate Palworld used AI in any stage of its development.

Zaytri also pointed to a blog post describing the development of Palworld, and if the article is to be taken at face value, did not employ the usage of AI during its development, despite the artist creating over 100 creations relatively quickly. (You can check out the dev post here.)

Did Pocketpair use AI or plagiarism to design Palworld?

Admittedly, the CEO’s enthusiasm over predatory AI practices looks rather malignant, and when you consider the admittedly derivative designs of Palworld’s many creatures, the involvement of AI is a valid concern. Ultimately, there’s no actual proof that Pocketpair has used AI at any stage of game development, whether it was used to generate worlds or creatures. It’s not helpful to assume the game used AI as a backbone for one of its major elements.

Plagiarism is an entirely different can of worms altogether and a potentially more valid one. One Twitter account is posting loads and loads of evidence of potential plagiarism, suggesting Palworld may have ripped off models from some of Pokemon‘s most iconic monsters. Many other game devs have sounded off on Twitter based on some of those tweets, suggesting that many of these similarities are unlikely to be coincidence, at the very least.

According to VGC, the CEO has responded to plagiarism accusations on Twitter, predictably deflecting from the actual accusations and not outright denying any inspiration from Pokemon altogether. The CEO has also taken responsibility for the production and asked for those online to avoid attacking the artists behind the designs.

Regardless, Palworld has launched to massive success, selling nearly 4,000,000 copies and reaching an absurdly high Steam player concurrent count. The hunger for an open-world monster collector is evident, and at the end of the day, we don’t have any real reason to sharpen our pitchforks…yet.