In January of 2022, Harvey Murphy was arrested and thrown in jail while trying to get his driver’s license renewed at a local DMV. According to a $10 million lawsuit Murphy has since filed, a “loss prevention” agent working for a Sunglass Hut retail store used facial recognition software to accuse Murphy of perpetrating an armed robbery at a store in Houston, Texas. In reality, Murphy was more than 2,000 miles away at the time of the robbery. 

According to a lawsuit 61-year-old Murphy has filed against Macy’s and Sunglass Hut, “he was arrested and put into an overcrowded maximum-security jail with violent criminals. While in jail trying to prove his innocence, he was beaten, gang-raped, and left with permanent and awful life-long injuries. Hours after being beaten and gang-raped, the charges against him were dropped and he was released.”

“All of this because a company told the police, based on artificial intelligence, that you were the one who committed terrible crimes,” the lawsuit said.

The armed robbery happened on January 22, 2022 in Houston, Texas. Two armed men went into a Sunglass Hut, threatened two employees with guns, and made off with cash and sunglasses. EssilorLuxottica is the parent company that owns Sunglass Hut, and like many large retail corporations they often employ individuals called “loss prevention” agents that assist with criminal investigations. According to the lawsuit, a EssilorLuxottica loss prevention agent named Anthony Pfleger reached out to the cops after the robbery and claimed he knew who had committed the crime.

“Pfleger told HPD they could stop their investigation because he found their guy,” the lawsuit states. “He stated that he worked in conjunction with Macy’s loss prevention to determine that the person who violently robbed the Sunglass Hut was Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr. (“Murphy”). Using artificial intelligence and facial recognition software, EssilorLuxottica and Macy’s took the video from the robbery and determined that Murphy was the robber.”

A Houston Macy’s had also been robbed, and Pfleger worked with its loss prevention agents to ID the culprits. Cameras in retail stores are so ubiquitous in America that we often don’t think about them anymore. These camera systems watch people while they shop and, occasionally, provide evidence to law enforcement of crimes. Many of them produce poor quality images and videos that make it hard to identify people.

Over the past ten years, retail stores began to hook up these cameras to facial recognition software systems. The idea is a computer could automatically identify known criminals when they enter a retail location and alert law enforcement or loss prevention agents to track the person’s movements.

But facial recognition technology is infamously unreliable. All-too-human biases are embedded in the systems, and they often do a terrible job of IDing people. There have been many cases of false arrests based on bad facial recognition technology, often involving Black people.

None of this stopped EssilorLuxottica from pushing Houston police to arrest Murphy. According to the lawsuit, Pfleger prepared one of the employees at the Sunglass Hut to positively identify Murphy in a photo lineup after he’d called the cops.

Murphy was an easy target for Sunglass Hut. He has a criminal past and was in the system. Now, he’s a grandfather who, according to the lawsuit, has turned his life around. According to the lawsuit,  old mugshots from the 1980s were publicly available and part of the facial recognition databases scanned by EssilorLuxottica’s systems.

At the time of the robbery, Murphy was in Sacramento, California. He didn’t find out about the robbery, or that he’d been blamed for it, until he went to the DMV to renew his driver’s license. He was arrested and held without bond. Despite sending his court appointed lawyer the evidence that exonerated him, he still spent hours in jail.

“A few hours before Murphy was to be released from jail, he was followed into the bathroom by three violent criminals,” the lawsuit said. “He was beaten, forced on the ground, and brutally gang raped. After this violent attack, one of the criminals held a shank against his neck and told him that if he reported the rape to anyone, he would be murdered. Murphy crawled to his bunk and faced the wall praying these men would not attack him again.”

He was released later, but the damage was done. “All of this happened to Murphy because the Defendants relied on facial recognition technology that is known to be error prone and faulty,” the lawsuit said.

Os Keyes, an Ada Lovelace Fellow and PhD Candidate at the University of Washington, called the case “tragic and entirely unsurprising.”

“This is precisely the kind of situation we've been warning about for years; that these systems, whatever their theoretical reliability, are in practice so finicky, and so consequential, that they cannot be fixed,” Keyes told Motherboard. “The only thing I'd push back on is Murphy's lawyer's claim that it could happen to anyone; these systems are attractive precisely because they promise to automate and speed up ‘business as usual,’ which includes laundering existing police biases against people who are already in the system, minority groups, and anyone else who doesn't fit. This outcome is as inevitable as it is horrifying, and should be taken as a sign to restrict and reconfigure policing in general as well as FRT in particular.”

Reached by email for comment, Macy’s told Motherboard that it did not comment on pending litigation. EssilorLuxottica did not respond.

Palworld is the first big hit video game of 2024. Like all good PC games with a thriving community, mods for Palworld are coming in. But in Palworld’s modding scene, there’s one topic that’s quickly becoming taboo: Pokémon.

The game has only been out a few days, selling over 5 million copies and sparking several interrelated controversies, and mods that make it look more like Pokémon are already floating around. The response from Palworld’s modest modding community has been to avoid the subject entirely, lest they attract the aggressively litigious eyes of Pokémon parent company Nintendo. One major repository for mods, Nexusworld, appears to be proactively removing pages that reference Pokémon mods for Palworld. 

Frequently described  as “Pokémon with guns,” Palworld is never beating the allegations that it riffed on Nintendo’s beloved franchise even if it has the trappings of an open-world survival game rather than a true Pokémon-style RPG. It took no time at all for modders to churn out a version of the game that replaces the main character with Ash Ketchum and several of the Pals with actual Pokémon. YouTuber ToastedShoes posted a video of the mod on X, only for Nintendo to hit him with a DMCA takedown.

“Nintendo has come for, please leave me in your thoughts and prayers,” ToastedShoes said in a follow up Tweet. Undeterred, ToastedShoes posted a 16-minute video of himself playing Palworld with the mods installed on YouTube.

“Is that going to stop me, with Nintendo coming for my family?” ToastedShoes said in the YouTube video. “No it will not. Pray for my family, we’re doing Pokémon in Palworld.”

ToastedShoes, whose real name is Joe Randle, has more than 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. His most popular videos involve him playing through popular video games using mods that make out of universe characters appear. In one video, he paid a guy to voice Peter Griffin while he played through Halo as the Family Guy. In another, he plays through God of War with Kratos and Atreus replaced by Homer and Bart from The Simpsons. He typically shares the mods he uses with his community, either through Patreon or on Discord.

That may not be happening with the Palworld Pokémon mod, though. “I’ve been getting a large influx of people asking where they can get the mod etc,” ToasteShoes said on his Discord. “We want to release it for free to everyone, however due to Nintendo sending a DMCA over the last tweet we want to tread lightly for the time being. We don’t want a lawsuit but I want to give you all a chance to play it for yourselves. I will keep you all posted on its progress and release. If the video gets tricked though it could very much be it. All depends on Nintendo.”

Update 1/124/24: After the publication of this piece, Nintendo hit ToastedShoes with a DMCA takedown for the YouTube video. The rest of the story follows along with some additional words from ToastedShoes and Nexus Mods. “Since the Twitter DMCA and now my YouTube video being blocked there are no further plans to produce content on the mod.”

Randle told Motherboard that Nintendo hasn’t reached out beyond the DMCAs. “Since the Twitter DMCA and now my YouTube video being blocked there are no further plans to produce content on the mod.”

Randle has a team of modders who craft the experience for him so he can go into the game blind to make videos. “With Nintendo watching me however the modders this time around have opted in to remain anonymous,” he said.

His team had an early copy of Palworld and were able to get 26 Pokémon into the game before they stopped work. The plan was to release it to his community, but—on the advice of legal counsel—he won’t be dong that now. “It sucks cause I really want to share them with the gaming community and modding scene but I don't think the risk is worth it. We are however working on another mod pack which will be similar which is all I can say for now,” he said.

In other modding spaces on the internet, mentioning Pokémon mods for Palworld is restricted and access to the files is absent. A mod that put Ash into Palworld was up on Nexus Mods was up briefly, but has been pulled with a message saying it’s “under moderation review.” A thread on the Nexus Mods forum suggesting the use of Pokémon assets in Palworld has also been removed.

“We do think that adding Pokémon content to Palworld is a very cool idea and we understand why people would want such a thing. However, we're not comfortable hosting this content at Nexus Mods,” the company told Motherboard in an email, citing Nintendo’s “merciless” legal history.

“Given Palworld's similarity to the Pokémon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action. We don’t think it's worth the risk to allow this content to be shared in our community. At best we would have to deal with the headache of DMCA/legal threats from Nintendo and at worst they may seek to take action against us and uploaders of the mods directly.”

The Discord server where Palworld modders have gathered is also being careful, banning any discussion of the Pokémon mod: 

“I'm sure many of you have been seeing all the content regarding the Pokemon mod for Palworld,” a Discord mod said in a server wide announcement. “While the memes and such are hilarious, the mod alone hosts a giant risk to the community and we'll need to take precautions so that Nintendo's lawyers don't nuke all of us with litigious actions. The mod is highly likely using ripped assets and is very illegal in Nintendo's eyes. Moving forward, here's our stance on the mod:

“Do NOT provide ANY links to this mod whatsoever. Do NOT provide ANY resources to pirate/leak the mod files,” they said. “Posts that involve the above will be immediately deleted and will result in an immediate ban. We realize that this is a very harsh action, but this is something we cannot afford to take lightly. Memes and casual discussion of the mod are allowed, just do NOT link this server to the actual mod and we'll all be safe.”

Nintendo is a famously litigious company, and Palworld looks a lot like Pokémon to begin with so the paranoia is probably warranted. “This looks like the usual ripoff nonsense that I would see a thousand times a year when I was Chief Legal Officer of Pokémon,” Don McGowan, who held the role from 2008 to 2020, told games journalist Stephen Totilo. “I’m just surprised it got this far.”

Pokémon-themed mods for other games have long persisted without controversy. You can get Pokeballs in Fallout 4 and even a fully voiced Pickachu in Skyrim. This list of Stardew Valley mods that use Pokémon-style art assets is too numerous to list. You can even use Blastoise as a handcannon in Resident Evil 4. Some of these mods have been up for years with no ire from Nintendo. Palworld’s breakout success might just put more of a target on its back, however.

Update 1/24/24: This story has been updated with additional comments from Nexus Mods and ToastedShoes.

Palworld is a new video game where players can capture knockoff Pokémon and put them to work in a factory manufacturing AR-15s. It sold 5 million copies in 3 days.

Palworld is made by a company called Pocketpair, it isn’t published by Nintendo, and it’s not an officially licensed Pokémon game. But that may be hard to tell because Palworld’s monsters are all thinly veiled reproductions of the beloved pocket monsters. That hasn’t mattered to players. The dream of putting a minigun in the hands of a creature that looks like Raichu—but isn’t quite Raichu—has been popular. Despite the game being sold in early access, meaning it's unfinished, players have flocked to it in droves and the game has been well reviewed across the internet.

Unless, of course, it’s a part of the internet that’s full of Pokémon fans.

Five million units in three days is unheard of for a small developer like Pocketpair. Those are Call of Duty numbers. Last year’s best selling game, Hogwarts Legacy, sold 22 million copies over the course of the entire year. The rapid breakout success of a game that, on its face, is just Pokémon with guns has some fans of the original pocket monsters upset.

Die hard Pokémon fans are angry online because they see Palworld as a cheap asset flip and they believe, without evidence, that Pocketpair used AI to create it. The first accusation has some truth to it. Many of the monsters in Palworld are obvious rip-offs of existing Pokémon, although asset flipping typically refers to the practice of buying pre-made 3D models. 

To this I say: “So what?” The hard truth about Pokémon is that all of its games are asset flips of themselves. The franchise has stagnated for more than 20 years. Every year a new game drops, and every year fans are disappointed that it’s the same as the one before it with slightly new mechanics.

In Palworld, Pocketpair took the basic formula of Pokémon and set it in a Breath of the Wild style open world. It took the popular survival and crafting genre tropes of Minecraft and blended them with the cartoony fun of Pokémon. Then it made everything a little dark by allowing you to force Pals to work in mines and manufacture weapons. Players can even butcher captured Pals for their meat. In practice, Palworld is a functional open-world survival game that tasks players with collecting resources—including pals to help with combat and construction—and building the home base of their dreams while traversing the world and tackling bosses. 

As some aggrieved Pokémon players have pointed out, Nintendo has no one to blame but themselves for failing to iterate on its tired formula. That an upstart could sell an early access game for $30 and move 5 million copies is proof that people are hungry for something new from the tired franchise. But diehard Pokémon fans are still mad because the game shamelessly capitalizes on their favorite monster-collecting IP—which, to their credit, is true.

The hardcore fans’ second accusation is harder to prove: that Palworld was created using AI. 

There’s no good evidence that AI was used to make Palworld. To justify the claim, people point to various tweets from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe. In the tweets, Mizobe talks at length about AI and ponders how AI-generated images and assets might evade copyright protections.

“If passed through the filter of AI, the images are often not [depicting] a specific thing, so maybe the copyright issue is resolved?” Mizobe wrote in a tweet from 2022, which was translated from Japanese. In another tweet, from 2023, he wrote: “We might see true AI-powered games on GPT4 this year…!”

Pocketpair also published a game in 2022 that did use generative AI, but it was also the entire point of the game. In AI: Art Imposter, groups of players compete in an art competition using an AI system. All players get a “theme” and have to use a prompt generated to make artwork based on the theme. But one of the players didn’t get the memo. When the art is revealed, the players have to guess who made their art without knowing the theme.

Pocketpair obviously isn’t above using AI to make video games, but the only time it’s done so it was clear about what the systems were used for. Pocketpair didn’t respond to Motherboard’s request for comment on the issue, and as of this writing, there is no clear evidence it used AI to make its wildly successful video game about cute monsters wielding deadly weapons and working in factories.

To me, that sounds like a pretty good time. Much better than working my way through the ranks of local Pokémon trainers playing a turned-based rock-paper-scissors game that hasn’t changed much in almost 30 years.