Palworld and the Optics of AI

palor has allegedly sold over 5 million copies in its first few days of Early Access reaching over 1.3 million concurrent players and although it's for very different reasons we're seeing backlash towards creators comparable to the Hogwart situation but is the backlash truly warranted in this case first I hope that viewers won't take this video as an indication that I'm a supporter of AI cannibalizing the important skill sets that creators of all back grounds have built up I'm well aware of the impact that these tools are having on our economy after all I was one of the first to be let go from a tech layoff shortly after the release of chat GPT 4 this is not a discussion about whether or not it's morally correct to use models trained on unpaid artists work because it's not this instead is a discussion about how we as Gamers can deal with the moral quandry of supporting companies that do awful things because AI isn't a looming threat anymore it's here case you've been living under a rock the release of this game didn't necessarily come out of nowhere in fact this title has been highly sought after and supported throughout its development for The Unique concept and Innovative trailer it was initially announced in 2021 and even in its most natal phase showed some very ambitious promises unfortunately for Nintendo this Indie Studio seems to have delivered on many of those mechanics developed and published by an indie team from Japan this project will be their second Early Access game following craftopia in 2020 you'll notice in this Gameplay trailer that they look remarkably similar they're both open world multiplayer survival games with a focus on Crafting and building a base I've seen a lot of bad reviews as of late claiming that the team had abandoned this previous game and just implemented the successful features into what is now known as pow world but I do not know this to be true considering since December they've had multiple major updates in the form of new biomes map functions new tech tiers and even major overhauls of the game actually I can pretty confidently say that none of the development of craftopia has been stalled by the creation of Po world because it was made by an entirely new team starting with only four employees and growing to be quite large with about 40 people on staff not including any additional help from contractors that they outsourced and although this game is still early access with some bugs here or there I can tell just from looking at it that it's a massive improvement over their earlier games which exclusively designed the map using purchased assets the team that worked on this game is a beautiful mix of veterans and new talent and truly it's a bit of a miracle that this game was produced at all considering most of the development team didn't understand the engine it was running on or even the basics of game development such as 3D model creation rigging and naming conventions but how do we know all this unlike most corporate companies drowning in ndas up to their knees pocket pair CEO released a public blog entry going into detail about the team and many of the roadblockers that they experienced during production although words are just that words well I can't be sure that everything is reflected with 100% accuracy it does give an insightful look at the processes behind creating this game for example we learned that this is a pretty Scrappy rag tag team the main artist was rejected by over a hundred companies prior to joining pocket pair and in fact she was declined from pocket pair 5 months earlier from her acceptance many of the animations such as the gun animations were created by a 20-year-old middle school graduate who works part-time at a convenience store despite this they claimed that they were able to create all of pal world's models in house and instead of man managing a budget they opted to just keep working until the money ran out in total the project cost about 6.7 million us but before we go into the AI use in this game I think it's important to mention why you shouldn't expect a lawsuit in regards to the designs used the early hype for this game has always been that it's Pokemon but with guns and it's fair to say that this game borrows designs ideas and entire UI choices much like peta's Pokémon black and blue it shouldn't be a secret to any of the Pokemon fans that many of the designs and behavior choices are there purely to invoke a specific Pokemon you've seen before as such it seems pretty evident to me that this game has been created with the intent to use parody law as protection for the borrow designs the intention is to invoke the feelings of Pokémon game except without the limits that developers of those games place on the fan base you're really in a Westworld situation white hat black black hat for example po world is an open world experience one that is not linear where you have the freedom to do what you want even going so far as allowing players to kidnap creatures and humans to work under unsightly conditions you can even kill and consume your pets and experience that I definitely don't see a family-friendly company like Nintendo offering it would be lying to say that it isn't very reminiscent of Pokemon Legends arus or archus if you're Ed even the start of the game you end up finding a strange device on the beach that's almost shot for shot the same I can't help but feel that even with all of the amazing work put into that title that Nintendo's version clearly pales in comparison even without the violent aspects of Po world games like Legends Ares just can't compete with the sheer size and attention to detail on the map although I will admit this could be as a result of Hardware limitation but honestly I'm a bit tired of making that excuse because breath of the wild and tears of the Kingdom were not handicapped by these issues to the same extent much of the fan base has offered up this game power world as the competition that Nintendo needs in order to continue surviving in such a saturated Market in my head they take up two completely different spheres as the gaml feels much more like Ark Pia or even Minecraft I've been following the release of pal world for quite some time now so I was a bit shocked to see the push back on release especially since it's been in development for a long time now far longer than AI tools like mid Journey were publicly available in fact the trailer that was released almost 3 years ago proudly displays many of the designs that people are claiming were created by AI however that doesn't mean that the team behind this game is off the hook quite yet taking inspiration is one thing in the eyes of copyright law but but recently a Twitter user B frog posted what seems to be a pretty concerning evidence of multiple models having their meshes line up almost exactly to previous models that were used in scarlet and violet at the end of the day a dog is a dog and a lizard is a lizard so we would need more significant proof to understand what's happening here even if the team used The Ripped model as a base my understanding is that they would still have to rig it on their own which may create enough of a difference to stop them from getting sued one member of the team adachi they were hired to help create rigs for all of the pals since he had experience with motion design it appears that some of the characters share poses and similar walk Cycles to their Pokémon counterparts opening the question of whether not some Corners were cut here but again is this inspired how many ways can we really make a wolf walk and if it is stolen how would one go about proving that in the court of law if you have to be an expert on this subject I'd love to hear what you think regardless of if it is or isn't the CEO has taken full responsibility at this point for anything that may have slipped through the cracks sharing publicly that they had previously cleared legal reviews and had absolutely no intent of infringing on others IPS frankly it would be an absolute miracle for them to have gone this far without a season assist from Nintendo had they been violating IP law in case you're unaware Nintendo's legal team has a of snuffing out everything from fan projects to Super Smash Bros Gatherings for that reason I find it hard to believe that they would have only gotten wind of this now years after they've been building it in public to release a statement so definitive makes me think that pocket Paar was an active communication with a member of Nintendo's team clearly parodying designs is one thing but stealing private assets to be used in a for-profit game is another considering Nintendo's litigious background I'm sure will know within the next couple of years whether the asset claim holds enough ground for them to seek lawsuit as of January 9th valve has publicly stated that any games featured on steam's Marketplace must publicly disclose the use of AI to ensure that it's not generating illegal content and since this game was released after the announcement seems clear to me that valve would have had to run a full pre-release review on pal world to ensure that it didn't include any illegal or infringing content however since many AI are essentially a black box to users in terms of what they've been trained on I'm not even sure it's possible to conduct these reviews successfully especially if it's being done by a human but let's just assume they made it past the AI checks and instead take a look at the robust team that was built out for this project they had a ton of concept artists and five character artists one of which worked on fire emblem's Tokyo Mirage sessions for comparison Pokemon sword and Shield's development team was about 180 to 20 200 people not including contractors that game was created and shipped in just under 2 years which is an insanely fast development cycle compared to PO world who seemed to take their time and work until they literally ran out of money the team behind the game did a public interview in which they stated that the designs for the palace were based on real animals and cultural myths from places like Europe China and Egypt it's only inevitable that some creatures like zatu would appear similar since they're based on the same cultural icons and it's even possible that they use some kind of Pokémon photo Basher to get inspired and start on these creations but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say any of these models were generated solely off of AI while it is possible to use chat GPT to create a blender script for 3D models I have a hard time believing that they would be able to produce all of these since March especially when a lot of them were featured in a trailer from before those tools even existed not to mention that much of the tutorials I've seen on how to create 3D assets using AI show pretty basic Creations it would probably be easier to start fresh and build something manually then try to work off of whatever these prompts spit back out at you and it would be nearly impossible for someone who has a lack of understanding about how these programs work I mean just look at these examples from point e MV dream and Magic 3D this is supposedly the peak 3D object generating technology I want you to look at this and tell me in good faith that this is on par with the quality of models presented in power world it seems like we're at an impass and it appears that everyone at least on Twitter has agreed to determine this game as guilty until proven innocent whether the discussion is about a CEO's morals stolen assets or the story itself Gamers always have an opinion and if you end up on the wrong side of that opinion yikes it's easy to say just go play something else but where else do you find a game like this this because it's not Nintendo and I've yet to see any competitors with this amount of detail obviously I don't want to support a company that steals and will eventually put artists out of business but what if I'm already doing that we've all been slowly watching game companies Implement confusing in-game currency changes and gotcha mechanics in order to convince us to spend more while releasing content that is frankly not worth the price tag anymore I myself have boycotted multiple game titles in the past 5 years as a method of pushing back on the these practices but as a whole we've seen them become normalized as the industry standard large corporations like Square Enix creators of Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts are releasing games with actual AI assets included in the final product while openly sharing their desire to aggressively Implement Ai and blockchain Technology Riot games literally traced an artists work the other day and posted on their social Channels with the artists publicly retweeting saying they weren't paid not to mention their entire game catalog is just other games reskinned with a slight twist or of course the over 1,500 female employees who were sexually harassed and even farted on by the CEO I suppose it's not as bad as blizzard who has literal blood on their hands and a never-ending mountain of controversy that seems to grow even larger by the minute I'd say the problem was solved because Microsoft acquire them but their move to block third party accessories for controllers is probably one of the most Anti consumer decisions that we've seen especially when disabled individuals rely heavily on modified controllers to play the games they love not to mention the recent density of layoffs in the gaming industry under the guise of financial difficulties when in reality I think we all know they're just looking to cut corners and Pad their profits so we could try to play Indie Games right wrong besides pal world I feel strongly that another game ended up in this exact situation minus the success spir spir is a cozy game released by a passionate development team whose work was not able to be appreciated due to some pretentious comments made by their CEO tldr the CEO feels icky paying for full-time creators to review their game and instead of thanking the players that did make a video of it during their launch they decided to complain that they didn't receive any notable marketing then pay for it so if we can't trust big corporations and we can't trust Indies how do we decide what to play are we as creators and Gamers expected to thoroughly research every single game making sure to scrape through old tweets from the entire team behind it if we've put more than 3 hours into a game right before finding out that it's problematic are we supposed to just never touch it again and say goodbye to that money I don't think that's realistic in fact I think we should just try to be more kind and understanding to each other if someone is playing a game that doesn't mean they support their CEO's politics or even that they're aware of the controversy associated with it and it's pretty fair to say that if a team of 50 plus people work on something we're probably not going to feel great about all the opinions that those people hold because we all have different opinions they created art and we can choose to engage with it or not to engage with it but Above All Else let's stop running our beloved creators off this platform we've lost so many people this year no matter what they decide to do play or not play will be seen as a message to their fans choosing to play a game could result in them losing hundreds of thousands of followers regardless of if they agree with the politics and that's not right that's a hard decision to make no matter how large the Creator is and they're only human so please give them a break they're probably doing their best as for po world what I'm seeing here is active communication from a team of Gamers that just wanted to bring their dreams to reality so until proven otherwise I'll be with my pals thanks for watching [Music] bye

Channel: Saiko Sloth

Views: 7,360

Keywords: palworld, ai generation, ai 3d model, vtuber, vtuber palworld, vtuber ai, vtuber discussion, vtuber video essay, palworld vs pokemon, palworld 3d render, palworld ai stolen, palworld stolen art, palworld controversy, pokemon palworld lawsuit

Id: xAlijQY9MNg

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024