Since its release, Palworld has taken the gaming community by surprise. It broke records and shot to the top of the Steam rankings in a matter of days, reaching a peak of over a million concurrent players.

But there have been waves of complaints against the survival game that quickly gained its nickname “Pokemon with guns” due to allegations of “plagiarism.” This has happened not only with Pokemon but also with games like Rust and Ark.

The Pals in the game are the subject of Palworld’s primary-and possibly most questionable case of “copying.” Their similarity to other Pokemon has caused an uproar on the internet, and many now think that there is “proof” that artificial intelligence is being used in their creation.

Specifically, the previously deleted tweets from Palworld CEO Takuro Mizobe about AI and Pokemon and their belief that AI would eventually be able to avoid copyright infringement.

Palworld users believe that “evidence” shows that AI is being used to generate Pals:

Many players and gamers have expressed their opinions and compared various Pokemon on social media platforms side by side with numerous Pals from the game.

But Takuro Mizobe, the CEO of Pocketpair, has been under fire after a number of old tweets from 2021 appeared again.

The post from their official Twitter/X account stated, “The AI has evolved so much that I can no longer tell which one is a Pokemon.” It featured several Pokemon as well as AI-generated lookalikes.

On November 28, 2022, they tweeted, saying, “Maybe the copyright issue will be resolved if you pass it through the AI filter? The image is often not of a specific thing.” The statement “The general public’s perception of copyright may have changed considerably in about 30 years” comes last.

After the tweets went viral, several people expressed their dissatisfaction, with one person writing, “I was super excited to jump into Palworld but all the evidence I’m seeing makes it pretty probable that the game is using AI generative images to create the designs for their monsters.”

Others, however, have emphasized that AI-generated assets and the use of an image generator in Pocketpair’s “AI: Art Imposter” game have already been shown. As of the time of writing, Takuro Mizobe, CEO of Pocketpair, had not responded to the allegations that AI is being utilized in Palworld.