Randy Pitchford says Gearbox has a firm no-AI policy after posting an AI-generated image of an AI working at Gearbox

Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford is making friends and influencing people on social media, which is to say that he's repeatedly insisting the studio does not use generative AI in a professional capacity (and occasionally calling people names) after a gen AI image he posted over the weekend drew a pretty negative reaction from followers.

The whole thing started on May 3: "I asked my primary AI tool to generate a selfie that indicates how they feel based on how I interact with it and this is what it generated (note: background words were not prompted and have zero relationship to anything real)," he wrote on X.

Boy, that's a ratio.

In a reply to a follower who said a real photo of Pitchford in his office "would have been much better received," he wrote," The point was to make the AI make a picture of how it saw itself to put a lens on the absurdity of the idea of AI having an identity. In what universe does what you suggest have anything to do with the point?"

But it was all downhill from there: Other followers expressed concern about the use of generative AI in Borderlands games, or disapproval in general; Pitchford insisted several times that the intent was merely to be "silly," and that Gearbox's policy "is that we do not use AI for anything in any professional capacity that any customer could ever see."