It's been a while since Palworld was taking, well, the world by storm. A recent major update. A continued success by any metric.
Still, part of that initial hullabaloo involved anger over Palworld's pals—who were, if you listened to the peanut gallery, either sheer vibes and Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe being really excited about AI pokemon back in 2021 (which, in fairness, is pretty suspicious—but raised eyebrows aren't evidence).
As you might have noticed, though, it's 2024 now—and Mizobe seems to have a dimmer attitude towards the tech writ large, as hinted by a recent tweet (translated and spotted by Automaton).
"Palworld is often accused of using generative AI, but in reality, we do not use it. Our artists draw thousands of sketches. (The feature) introduces part of our Pal creation process, so anyone interested should have a look!"
パルワールドを大々的に特集頂いたCGWORLDの8月号は、今日発売です！パルワールドは生成AIを利用していると叩かれている事が多いですが、実際には使用していません。数千枚近くのラフ画をアーティストが描いています。パルの制作過程も一部紹介したので、興味がある方は是非ご覧下さい！ https://t.co/jtilGQgCl5July 10, 2024
As if to point and say 'look, we do concept art, promise!' Mizobe also shared a link to a snippet from the latest issue of CGWORLD magazine, which goes into the development of the pals featured in the base game. In it, several work-in-progress sketches are shared, as seen below.
Yeah, fair play. That's definitely concept art.
I was always of the mind that, while it certainly mattered if Palworld used AI or not (in the same way that it matters to whether your mate nicked the Mona Lisa), there wasn't much in the way of proof. The sentence 'was this made by AI?' when pointing at something that is merely bad is a genuine source of existential dread for me, especially as someone who liked to critique stuff even before I started writing for PC Gamer.
In other words, sometimes the curtains are just blue—and sometimes a human concept artist just looked at Mega Mewtwo Y and said drink my own wee.
