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What If Psyduck Could Cap You in the Knee?
Everyone’s playing Palworld, an early access Pokémon rip-off facing battles of its own.
There’s also that bizarre hook of arming these creatures, called “Pals,” with guns; a twist that undoubtedly adds to Palworld ’s virality in an environment where the possibility for the comically absurd is a huge factor driving a game’s popularity among livestreamers. That said, as Forbes notes, the evidence supporting the generative AI accusation is at this point spurious or circumstantial at best, but you can see why it’s easy to believe that Pocketpair, which seems to have taken all sorts of shortcuts to create its surprise hit, might’ve used that technology to produce its Pokémon knockoffs. In any case, Pocketpair might not have used generative AI to create Palworld, but in some deeper sense, the studio’s approach nevertheless follows the broad arc of what that technology sorta-kinda does: regurgitate wide swathes of what’s come before to produce something that ultimately feels uncanny even as it is successful within the parameters of what it’s trying to do.
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