Gearbox head Randy Pitchford says Borderlands maker won't use AI for "any work that could ever be seen" after posting ChatGPT-generated image of a Gearbox employee

An odd Twitter post from Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has once again spiraled out of control and prompted messaging on the company's policies, with generative AI at the center of the latest grease fire.

On May 3, Pitchford posted a ChatGPT-generated image depicting, per a May 4 clarification, "a picture of yourself as if you worked at my company, Gearbox Software." That is the prompt Pitchford gave the AI tool.

"My friends I was with for lunch earlier produced some funny things with similar prompts for themselves and I wanted to see what bullshit it would generate as an idea of a self identity because the idea of an AI even having an identity is nonsense," Pitchford says.

With that prompt, ChatGPT spit out an image of a middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper beard sitting in a dark-lit room with an oddly strict black-and-wood motif. In the background rests a whiteboard scrawled with words like "Borderlands 4," "players first," and, quite ironically, "creative autonomy."

That whiteboard also notably mentions "new IP," fueling speculation that Pitchford's ChatGPT history may have bled into this output. He says, "ChatGPT has no information from me about anything from my work."

Pitchford using AI at all, even just to make and share something he calls "embarrassingly hilarious," triggered alarm bells among Borderlands fans, especially on the heels of Borderlands 4 patch notes which some players thought veered close to AI-generated text in style and grammar. Several large game studios have publicly and privately experimented with AI in a variety of disciplines, especially for QA and adjacent roles.

As a result, Gearbox is now the latest major game studio to proactively head off gen-AI accusations.

"I don’t use AI for work and our policy is no AI in any work that could ever be seen by any customer," Pitchford continues. "I’m using my personal phone and not my work computer (which is isolated from personal systems). It got whatever it generated from whatever public knowledge of Gearbox it has access to (hence my very clear disclaimer) and the timing or content of this has exactly zero to do with whatever feelings you’ve spun yourself up about with patch notes."

As a major studio under Take-Two, which also owns GTA 6 maker Rockstar Games, Gearbox's stance on gen AI use is under more scrutiny than some others. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has called gen AI "the future of technology," but also dismissed claims it will "reduce employment" or "create hits."

Just this March, Zelnick laughed off claims that AI could or will one day generate something on the scale or complexity of GTA 6.

Pitchford himself, meanwhile, was described by Zelnick last year as "one of the all-time great game makers," though his "big personality" can cause flare-ups much like this.

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