Palworld: understand the game's controversy involving plagiarism and AI
O Pal It's breaking on social media. Since finally arriving on Xbox and PCs via Game Pass and Steam, Palworld has been quite successful with its “differentiated” gameplay and, especially here in Brazil, due to the localization for our language generating all kinds of memes.
But that's not the only reason you Pals are trending on the internet in recent days: several users have been pointing out many similarities between the monsters in the new game and others from Pokemon, the famous franchise about finding, capturing and using creatures in battle. In addition to the case, another thing that has caused controversy is the use of Artificial intelligence in Palworld for the creation of Pals.
Palworld is accused of plagiarism on social media
The success of the game, developed by Pocket Pair, was resounding: not only did the producer claim to have sold 5 million copies of your game in just 3 days, like yesterday (21), in the morning, the servers were down. According to the account of Palworld on X (formerly Twitter), the servers could not support the huge number of simultaneous players and, therefore, the multiplayer mode had to be temporarily disabled.
Server Outage Notice:
As the number of concurrent players across all platforms exceeded 1.3 million, the Epic Online Service is currently experiencing outages due to an unusually high load worldwide.
Singleplayer is unaffected by this server outage.
This is causing…— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 21, 2024
Such success, of course, put the game in the spotlight and caught the attention of many, many people. And a good part of the public began to realize certain similarities between Pals and Pokemonwith some even suggesting the possibility of plagiarism. One of the suspicions is that the game's creative team used Pokémon “fusion” tools to “create” Pals for the new game.
Tools of this type are quite popular among fans of Pokemonallowed merging two distinct creatures into another “completely new” one, with similarities to the original little monsters. And there are a lot of people accusing Pocket Pair of having done something similar in Palworld.
— onion_mu (@onion_mu) January 18, 2024
Galarian Meowth face pic.twitter.com/fc6juxyEe9
— Barbie-Élite4 (@Barbie_E4) January 18, 2024
Users criticize use of AI in Palworld
The situation got even worse for the developer when some social media users started doing some good old detective work, discovering that one of the previous titles produced by Pocket Pair was called “AI: Art Imposter”. Apparently, the game literally used artificial intelligence to create “art” using existing works to generate “new” images.
here is a clip of gameplay that clearly shows the game utilizing an AI image generator
it's one thing for a game to include AI generated assets (which is already bad, and I don't know why you think that'd be ok either), but to include an entire generator itself is much worse pic.twitter.com/LFWj3jFa4v
—Zaytri?? #StrikeForPalestine (@imZaytri) January 19, 2024
The whole thing got even worse when some publications from Takuro Mizobe, the CEO of developer Pocket Pairwere found and translated using the X platform's own translation tool. In the posts, Mizobe alluded to the rapid way in which Artificial Intelligence has been evolvingpointing out that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate official Pokémon from AI-generated monsters.
Furthermore, the producer's CEO was also in favor of the use of AI tools, saying he believes that “often the image is not of a specific thing” and that therefore “perhaps the copyright problem will be resolved”. For him, in the next 30 years it is possible that public perception will become favorable to Artificial Intelligence creations and that copyright changes “considerably.”
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?? ???????(??????????????????????) pic.twitter.com/PL6ikWhlFU—Takuro Mizobe | Craftopia, Palworld (@urokuta_ja) December 15, 2021
THERE????????????????????????????
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?? ???????(??????????????????????) pic.twitter.com/PL6ikWhlFU—Takuro Mizobe | Craftopia, Palworld (@urokuta_ja) December 15, 2021
Mizobe also made a recent post on the game's blog in which he commented on how just one undergraduate student was responsible for around 100 conceptual arts of the game. The CEO highlighted how the girl was rejected by a hundred companies before being hired by Pocket Pair. Furthermore, the executive also said happy and surprised by the popularity of the gamewhich at the beginning of its development did not even have an animation team to work on the project.
The website VGC contacted Pocket Pair to talk about accusations of plagiarism and the use of AI tools in the game's design, but so far no response.
Still not expected to arrive on PS5, Palworld is now available in early access for Xbox and PC via Game Pass and Steam.
