Palworld Dev Reacts To "AI Slop" Claims, Says It's "Complete Nonsense"

When Palworld was first released in early 2024, one of the criticisms levied against the game in some circles pertained to allegations of the developer using generative AI. Palworld communications director and publishing manager, John "Bucky" Buckley, has now responded, discussing how these claims hurt the people at the studio. He also said the allegations are "complete nonsense."

Asked by IGN how the allegations of "AI slop" impacted the workers at Pocketpair, Buckley said, "Massively, massively, massively, massively."

"That is by far I would say the biggest kind of thing that was ever against us, still to this day. Go to any Palworld posts or any news article about Palworld, or Reddit post, you'll see someone say, 'I hate this company. They use AI,' and it's complete nonsense. It's upsetting," he added.

Everyone at Pocketpair was affected by these claims, Buckley said, especially the concept artists. "We have a few Pal concept artists, and two of them in particular who've been there since day one. They're not big fans of this kind of stuff, but it's very hard to counter this, which we did learn," Buckley said.

To counter these claims, Buckley said the studio considered asking its workers to make a video and discuss the matter, but "none of our people want to be on camera."

"The vast majority of our artists are female, and in Japan, it's not the way to go about things right now. So they don't want to be on camera, they don't want to be public, they don't want to have their names out there. And yeah, it's upsetting for them, still today it's very upsetting to hear these things," he said.

Buckley said that Pocketpair releasing an official Palworld art book "definitely made a big impact" to push back against the AI claims, but "not as much as we would've hoped, perhaps."

People connected Pocketpair with AI in part because its CEO responded positively to a post about AI years ago, Buckley said. Pocketpair also released a party game called AI: Art Imposter, in which players generate AI images and then the other people try to deduce what's real and what was made using AI. People took this to mean Pocketpair as a studio loves generative AI, but Buckley said this misses essential context.

Palworld has been steadily supported since release with ongoing updates, the latest of which arrived in mid-March and added cross-play. Palworld is available now on PC and console. It's included with Xbox Game Pass.