Pokémon fans are making their own creatures with an AI bot

metro.co.uk:

A new bot is making it easier for fans to create their own pokémon designs, although don’t expect Game Freak to start using it.

Anyone who plays Pokémon, be they an adult or a child, has likely come up with their own ideas for new pokémon to encounter and catch in future games.

While some might go so far as to draw what they look like, a new AI bot has made the process much easier. By just typing a word into the generator, the bot will come up with a unique design.

As such, people have been putting in names of people they know, celebrities, and other characters to see how they’d look as pokémon.

There’s also an option for the generator to come up with up to four different designs at once, letting you decide which one best fits with whatever name you suggested.

Your mileage will vary on how these new creatures look. Some prompts have resulted in some designs that could easily pass as legitimate new pokémon to an untrained eye.

Others, however, are quite frankly hideous and would probably get someone at Game Freak fired if they were submitted for Pokémon Scarlet & Violet. (Although it’d still probably be better than Vanilluxe.)

You can try it out yourself via this link and there is some amusement to be had, especially since you can flesh out your AI generated pokémon’s biology, typing, and move set in your own time.

However, it’s also subject to the same criticisms that all AI made art faces. There are concerns that such technology could render professional artists obsolete, since a company could have AI make art for free rather than pay an actual person.

It’s the same issue voice actors have taken with AI generated voicework, something that’s already being implemented within the gaming industry.

Unless the technology is further