Cloudbird

NSFW 18+ // the cycle begins anew

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alienating cyberhell dystopia never felt so delicious // also i draw art sometimes i GUESS although it’s usually naked furries so uh // early 30s, if that makes you uncomfortable i totally get it, byyee


RufiaArt
@RufiaArt

I realise that at this point probably the last thing anyone wants is a long rambling post about Palworld - either you've chosen a stance already or you are sick of hearing about it, but as part of the discourse in regards to the game - I've heard a lot of things said that bother me in a way I can't shake and that go beyond just Palworld. So in an effort to hopefully try and put this whole conversation behind me, I am going to try and lay out all of my thoughts on the subject in a single comprehensive post.


Before I get to the philosophical meat of this post, there's a few things I need to get out of the way first.

First of all: AI art sucks. AI art is the theft of art without the artist's consent or compensation for the purpose of replacing them. It is fundamentally abhorrent and should be regulated out of existance. I have seen no hard evidence to suggest AI art was used in the creation of palworld.

Palworld has been in development since before the big AI boom we're all still suffering through and of the pal designs we saw then they looked more or less unchanged to the designs we have now. The studio did create a game called AI Art Impostor a few years back - but that's a game whose humor and gameplay are dependent on the AI being kinda' bad at what it does and it's easy to forget, but it really wasn't that long ago that AI art was still seen as just a kind of novel toy before we truly came to appreciate how it worked and the dangers it posed. On the other hand, typically tech CEOs are only too glad to boast about the use of AI in their latest product and yet that hasn't happened with Palworld.

Still could be enough of a red flag for someone to justifiably just not wanna' touch Pocketpair's work. But it's shaky grounds for a full blown accusations - and I don't say that merely to be a devil's advocate, I say that out of self-preservation. We, as artists, are not better off in an environment in which AI art accusations can be thrown around without substantial proof to back them up by any twitter user with an axe to grind. Make no mistake, this will come back to haunt us if the standard for proof is not high enough.


Second thing to get out of the way: plagiarism. This is the second accusation thrown at Palworld. People have compared 3D models from Pokemon and Palworld side by side and discovered, to a lot of people's surprise apparently, that if you scale the models to fit, one cartoon dog has generally similar proportions to another - and that therefore is proof that the models themselves were stolen. It has since been pointed out that the topology doesn't match up, but as ever in cases such as these, evidence to the contrary is only further evidence of guilt.

This claim is particularly bizarre to me. Again, Pocketpair have been working on palworld for years, legitimately stealing assets would be asking to get destroyed by Nintendo and have that work go down the drain, but more to the point I just don't really understand why it would be a cause for outrage? If you legitimately believe Palworld stole assets: you don't need to get mad at Pocketpair anymore - you could just grab some popcorn and wait for Nintendo's lawyers to perform a controlled detonation. It's not as if Nintendo need notifying, their lawyers are clearly paying enough attention to Palworld that a Pokemon Mod that was made for it got immediately nuked from orbit.


Third accusation: Palworld is an asset flip. Buying licensed assets to reduce your workload so that your studio can focus on the aspects of their project that are important to them does not make a game an asset flip. Even big studios buy sound libraries. An asset flip does not take years to make. Stop using terms if you don't know/care what they mean.


But now we arrive at the meat of my concern and the real reason behind this post. The idea that Palworld, and some of the designs therein, is derivative. For what it's worth I agree, at least to a limited extent, but as ever with any legitimate criticism, twitter took it and ran with it to the point of absurdity, as if a pink sheep or a dinosaur with a flower attached to its body are super unique concepts, exclusive to the Pokemon Company. Often this just gets called stealing / plagiarism too, because apparently a lot of people think plagiarism just boils down to being unoriginal. A lot of actual Pokemon wouldn't pass this kind of rigorous and bad faith comparison to every other Pokemon.

But far more insidious in my mind, is the implication being made here. The idea that art being derivative isn't just some kind of subjective criticism - but a fundamental sin. This is especially distressing to see pedaled so uncritically by other creatives, artists and game devs alike. People that really should know better.

Indeed I've seen a lot of criticism of Pocketpair as company on the basis that Palworld clearly draws inspiration from Pokemon, and Craftopia clearly draws inspiration from Breath of the Wild and they have another game in the works that clearly draws inspiration from Hollow Knight.

And I'm not going to claim that those games are good or that they're not clearly derivative. But I am going to say that there's plenty of good games and good art that is. Lethal Company's Coilheads are derivative of SCP's scp-173 which is derivative of Dr Who's Weeping Angels and I happen to quite like all 3. DUSK is heavily derivative of Quake, and it single handedly revitalized my love of retro FPS games, and whilst I've not yet seen The Orville, I've heard great things about it from Star Trek fans who aren't vibing with the more recent direction of the franchise. I think that if you like a thing, creating a legally distinct version of the thing you like so that you can do new things with it is good. Especially if, like in the case of Palworld, that thing is owned by a massive corporation. And despite what many of Palworld's detractors will say, a creature collector game, with real-time combat, survival elements and basebuilding is a new take on the genre.

The essence of art is experiencing that which already exists and, through our own perspectives, transforming it into something new. I feel like with the rise of AI, some creatives have grown afraid of admitting that, but the distinction is that AI's do not have a perspective. An AI does not experience a work of art, it can only process and distort it. The distinction is our humanity.

And a big part of the reason why this attitude bothers me so much, is that a lot of the criticisms levied at Palworld for being derivative are also regularly levied at creator collector games in general. Creature collector games absolutely are and deserve to be a genre in their own right, but almost inevitably, with every new release, new creature collector games get pitted against the Pokemon franchise and called ripoffs outright by a select group of people just for having elemental creatures that you can catch. And that group has been out in full-force in the discussion about Palworld. I don't think I really need to stress just how much worse off we would be if Pokemon actually did have ownership over the idea of a creature collector.

And this goes beyond Palworld and creature collector games. Every day I see artists create wonderfully creative and vibrant Fakemon and Mario OCs and pictures of Samus Aran getting railed and it's beautiful - but it's also horrifying. These corporations could crush you all at a moments notice, Nintendo already does it a ton with fangames! But you could just change a few things here and there and change that. File the serial numbers off: make it your own. I think we'd be better off if more people did take that approach, instead of people pouring their hearts and souls into properties owned by corporations that hold them in contempt.

Case in point, here's a recent example: Bunlith, the creator of PSX Bloodborne recently got hit by a legal notice on their latest project Bloodborne Kart and now have to scrub the branding off of their project. Now explain to me this: is Bloodborne Kart a shameful 'rip-off'? Will it become one now that they have been forced to make it legally distinct? What if Bunlith decides to take this opportunity to sell the game and make some money?

I don't believe there is anything wrong with either case, but that isn't the attitude I've seen from my peers over the past week. At least not specifically in regard to Palworld.

Why is it that for a game like Palworld being derivative is a cardinal sin but perhaps the most derivative form of art: fanart, gets a free pass?
Why do we bemoan Nintendo shutting down fangames but encourage this horrific corporation to do the same when a studio has gone through the effort to make their work legally distinct?
Why is it that a game like DUSK is considered a loveletter to Quake, but palworld is a vile rip-off of it's inspirations?
Why do we recognise the modern copyright system for the monstrosity that it is but still seek to actively reinforce it in a Billion dollar corporation's favor?

How did we even get to this point? I have to assume the major contributing factor here is the attachment people have for the Pokemon designs themselves. There've been a lot of indie FPS games in recent years and a decent chunk of them are set in hell and feature their own legally distinct imps, cacodemons and revenants and yet that isn't treated as something nefarious. Unoriginal perhaps, true, but unoriginality doesn't justify moral outrage and spurious accusations. It's hard not to think back to the release of Sword and Shield or Scarlet and Violet - when criticism of the Pokemon series really started to ramp up and it wasn't uncommon for people to say "if it's so easy to make a pokemon game, why don't you make one?". Now someone has, and a lot of those same people are furious.

I don't even know what I'm trying to say anymore, I'm just very tired. The internet turns everything into politics, except politics, which it turns into sports.


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in reply to @RufiaArt's post:

When I first heard about pal and everyone in my friends list started playing it the hipster in me didn't want to play it yet just cuz it was popular too fast. Then I heard the rumors but I didn't necessarily believe then, I simply held off on buying the game for a moment to do some research to see if I can find meaningful proof. Mostly cuz I don't wanna be a hypocrite and play something I deem against my core beliefs.
But I've found no substantial evidence so as far as I'm concerned I can play it once some of the (always annoying to me in any genre) hype goes down a tad.

big agree on all this. personally i mainly just dont vibe with the game from what ive seen of it but, unlike a certain subset of internet users who have deluded themselves or been deluded into believing that Everything one dislikes has to be morally reprehensible somehow, i'm not looking to demonize it or whatever

I don’t think anyone is saying we should “trust them”. There’s just no actual fact based reason to believe many of the things this game has been accused of, and that to me is good enough. It does not require trusting them, and to my knowledge they haven’t even themselves addressed any of these criticisms anyway

"They've abandoned multiple early-access games already"
I keep seeing this accusation but aside from the AI-art game, I can see there's two other games on Steam that they've published - a roguelike that was released in 2019 and was still updated several times times in 2023, including adding new content, and Craftopia (the one that's Palworld without the Pals), which was updated last week.

I think there’s a reason that folks aren’t addressing because it doesn’t quite fit the criteria of hard, fact based evidence, but I think is the main reason why they try to find said evidence and end up pointing at everything as if it’s proof even if it’s not.

The game reeks of being a cash grab. It feels like someone took the most popular thing and is trying to squeeze money from it. It feels like it was made with the same intention as so many knock-off mobile games centered around some woman telling you that your base is under fucking attack. Palworld simply hit it off.

And like.. they’re just vibes. Given the companies history I think it’s a fairly good bet though. I think disliking a thing because it feels like the creators of said thing are just bashing popular ideas together to make cash is valid. We just don’t know how to talk about that, because the discourse is poisoned by happening in a system that requires creatives to earn money.

I dont like the game, so I’m probably biased though.

the pocketpair CEO in an interview did explicitly state: "I don't have a creative vision. I just want to make a game people like." to answer the question of what his creative vision was.

Just let everyone else do the innovation and glue it all together into a marketable product. The derivative air is so thick you could cut it but at least it's legally distinct.

I will say that the game is very similar to Ark in it's concept though, even leveling up and choosing research. Ark being a creature collector of sorts with dinosaurs and the main distinction being in Palworld the ai have more autonomy in base creation whereas in Ark all they really are are mounts or attackers.

Personally, I think people are yucking other's yum too much with it. We knew it had been coming for years, but now that it's out people are mad and I think a lot of them are upset just because pokemon is a nostalgia thing and they see palworld as something trying to replace their history with it. So they get irrationally angry much the same way boomers do when milenials do anything different. I think they're mostly scared of being forgotten by the changing times and don't have any healthy way of dealing with it, so they lash out.

AI art sucks. AI art is the theft of art without the artist's consent or compensation for the purpose of replacing them. It is fundamentally abhorrent and should be regulated out of existance.

okay but what if it doesnt and youre wrong

like do you have any kind of reasoning behind why you would feel this way

Partly agreeing on the basis that generative AI is a tool that is basically here to stay. It's useful for disabled creatives and if it helps the most underserved among us put bread on their table I'm all for it.

I do think it's fair to say the technology needs to be developed and implemented with a set of ethics in mind, which doesn't presently seem to be the case. I'm of the mind that information should be free and all art is derivative, and that other technologies have been training off publicly available information for around two decades, so comparing AI art to theft is a bit of a reach.

The greater and far more existential threat is capitalist institutions pushing this technology to eliminate the need for creatives, which I think creatives have every right to be pissed about... it's just a problem with the system they feel helpless against... not neural network technologhy.

Even still, Tux1 asks the very important question: "why do we feel this way?"

A lot of the lashing out is stricly out of misinformation, the devs are getting death threats and their words are being misconstrued in bad faith.
Repetition of the myths around Pocketpair is setting a very dangerous precedent for how we as consumers interact with indie studios. The moral stakes and imperatives raised by a cold and indifferent group of onlookers always shapes up to be some sort of social conservatism. It's bigotry.

I can see and appreciate the frustrations on either side, but we need solution-oriented thinking around actual material problems instead of this strange cult behaviour, not running around with torches and pitchforks. Internet discourse has become a crab bucket and personally I hate it.

I mean, we're not talking about Pocketpair situation specifically, but AI art in general.
And I think it's pretty obvious why people feel strongly about AI art: because it's yet another way corporations (tech giants who make AI and game dev studios like Embark who use it) to trample on creators and actors. Generative AI is basically plagiarism machine with enough deniability that you can't easily pinpoint the plagiarism.

Generative AI is grounded in neural networks. It doesn't contain a vast library of images to plagarize, it's a mystery code noodle predictive model trained on publicly available information.

If genetative AI were to be counted as plagarism then so too would human art like collage and fan works, which I think we can agree would be a far more troubling alternative to making peace with the technology. If anything, it's weakening copyright law and seting up these big companies for a nasty surprise down the road.

It doesn't contain a vast library of images to plagarize

No, the model doesn't contain those images but it is, by nature, a derivation of those images.

trained on publicly available information

"Publicly available" doesn't mean "you can take anything and do anything with it".

If genetative AI were to be counted as plagarism then so too would human art like collage and fan works

Which absolutely can be considered plagiarism if you take other people's art and pretend like you did it.

If anything, it's weakening copyright law

It... Isn't though? It might be making an exception for this particular thing (mostly because corporates find it more profitable to have a serial-number-filing-off machine than to fight one) but it still doesn't dismantle the copyright law in any way that matters. It doesn't encourage preservation of art, doesn't shorten the durations of copyright. Heck, it doesn't even encourage remixing that much, because an average user isn't likely to train a model themselves.

Yes. Taking work and pretending it is yours is plagarism, but this is not the nature of generative AI.

You literally can't copyright any product of a generative AI in the US... there is no situation where a derivative work can be used to wholly circumvent the need for a designer or artist. Anything after that is just fluff, there's no harm in making things from models trained off of innumerable sources for personal use, and there is genuine value in anything that makes it easier for people who would otherwise be relegated to sex work to labor in other areas.

I'm not sure what the actual argument being made here is. The people who want gay space communism are being more ferocious about this than Disney lawyers, but they can't make heads or tails of what this thing is actually good for.

there is no situation where a derivative work can be used to wholly circumvent the need for a designer or artist

Clearly not what Embark thought when they made The Finals with AI voices.

there is genuine value in anything that makes it easier for people who would otherwise be relegated to sex work to labor in other areas

Is there value of forcing artists and VAs to go to sex work or other labor because they'd get less work and/or less pay because of the AI art?

The people who want gay space communism are being more ferocious about this than Disney lawyers

Again, it's because Disney (and other corporations) are the primary beneficiaries. They can ignore (for now) people doing AI art of their characters because they get to profit from the new angle of exploitation.

  1. You still need talents to train off of and developers to implement these things. Embark's indiscretion is not to be confused with the nature of the tools they use. For this reason I find the argument of AI generated media as plagarism inapplicable as generative AI is a probability model and not an agent with willful intent to take one's ideas or works.

  2. This is bad faith mental gymnastics. Sacrificing the underserved and marginalized for the principle of the matter is just... bigotry. There's no way around it. Furthermore, it does not make sense to allude to a correlation between work that needs to be done and a departure into sex work. In the case of VAs, their work is always brief and they are moving between several projects anyways. There's no one job that can sustain them. Secondly, actual real sex workers need to use any tools available to them to avoid being destitute. This includes using generative AI to reduce the time and effort around creative labors like writing, drafting concepts for visual works, or really any reason that they can imagine if it allows them to live and eat another day.
    Artists should understand how their work is being used or implemented. That is a seperate issue from generative AI though and more an issue with companies doing the thing where they try to extract as much value as possible from as little cost as possible.

The reason this is pertinent because the assets the AI creates and the AI are a packaged deal, there's no reason or means for one to exist without the other, and the tools are being developed and implemented whether we want them to or not, so instead the discussion needs to turn to how the companies are being held accountable, and how we as people benefit from the technology, not the endless, fruitless turning wheel of discourse around the moral imperative in abstaining from using a tool for recreational means.

For the purposes of Palworld, Pocketpair went on to hire nearly 40 staff for the project, if they were really so invested in AI art why did they need to expand their team by ten times? Even though some of the staff seem curious about AI, the assets they put towards their games come out of actual human work...

I really wish Cohost would add the ability to "thumbs up" comments because I would've given each of your comments in this thread a thumbs up 👍 Y'all have a good head on your shoulders and if I could gift you your favorite pastry I would make it by hand to deliver ^u^

I know one element of this conversation that keeps me from making this kind of post is that the people who actively and aggressively like Palworld are the shittiest people and I don't want to get their attention. When left with the feeling of 'I don't know what I'm saying and I'm very tired' I just don't post about it.

This essay seems to be leaning in the direction of support for Palworld Enjoyers though... the point is that there's a lot of pedantry around what constitutes theft when concievably no person is injured by the existance of titles like Palworld that have modeled themselves after other games -in this case ARK Survival Evolved- with a completely superficial resemblance to Pokémon.

I initially didn't pay any mind because I had no interest in the game...

  1. When I heard that pokemon designs had been copied with minor changes I thought it was a bit skeezy but who cares, Nintendo could use the competition and if it's super egregious it'll all hash out in the court of public opinion.

  2. When I heard that they used AI to develop designs I cared a bit more because artists all over the place are having their work scraped without permission and used to train generative AIs. On top of that it feels really icky because it would mean that designers who would have normally had more work at Pocketpair to come up with monster designs for the game would've lost that work due to the reliance on AI.

  3. Then I saw the twitter post about the fakemon one artist created that seemed to have been copied with minor changes to create Hangyu ( https://twitter.com/Saetapocha1/status/1718232547073655110 ), which I actually cared about the MOST even though it was just a fakemon because I've seen artists repurpose their fakemon designs into characters they use in other work later and other artist who have made "fakemon" VERSIONS of some of their OCs. There's just a HUGE risk there for any creator who had their fakemon designs ripped like that if they later used the design in their own published work. A lawsuit could be filed that at BEST would drain the original creator's pockets of funds and at worst result in the original creator's work being deemed copyright infringement of Pocketpair's IP. Wouldn't be cool.

So while I didn't really care initially, I finally developed a really negative opinion on Palworld.

The thing is... I just (like, over the past hour) looked into all that again now that some time has passed and some dust has settled annnnnd...

They've sworn that they used no AI in the design process and most of the designs would've been made well before the major AI boom, so yeah, like you said this doesn't make a lot of sense.

And on the fakemon that the one artist designed, it turns out, unbelievably, due to how similar the two designs are, Hangyu was shown in a promo video for the game a year before they had made the fakemon ( https://twitter.com/Saetapocha1/status/1747723495423819922 ). I don't think the artist even saw the promo video so it looks like this was one of those weird instances of parallel development. But Palworld's design came first so it's impossible that it would be theft.

One thing I'll say that Pocketpair did that acted against them in this was that they allowed Boltmane's design to stay the way it was up to the point that it gained a 3d model and was shown off in previews. It was one of the early monsters that I saw used as an example of a stolen design as it seems to be an electric type cat monster that bears a striking resemblance to the electric type cat pokemon Luxray. Like I said earlier, pokemon designs getting copied with minor changes bothered me the least, but seeing that one made it easier for me to believe that the WORSE stuff was true.

In the end Pocketpair didn't implement Boltmane though, and while Boltmane is in the live game and can be cheated into your party, the current version of its model has it's yellow highlights replaced with blazing fire. Pocketpair may be intending to rename and repurpose Boltmane from an electric type to a fire type which removes some degree of the similarity at least.

So the negative things I had been led to believe about Palworld were at least 99.9% untrue. I do hope others who might've been interested in Palworld end up finding out that this is the case and give it a look. ...as for me, I'm still not interested, but your post led me to look into things and at least I know how things really are now! So thanks!

(Also that final point about the internet turning everything into politics and politics into sports? Yes. My gears are grinding constantly. 😬)