Nintendo has been cracking down on all sorts of things recently, and now according to a new story from The Verge, it’s seemingly targeting AI-generated Mario pictures.
A company called Tracer is apparently working on Nintendo’s “behalf” and has filed takedown notices to remove “dozens” of posts on social media platform ‘X’. This supposedly includes ones generated by xAI’s Grok AI tool. The same service is also using AI to help assist its own process:
“The company apparently used AI to identify the images and serve takedown notices on behalf of Nintendo, hitting AI-generated images as well as some fan art.”
As detailed by the source, Tracer offers “AI-powered services to companies, purporting to identify trademark and copyright violations online”.
The AI-generated images depicted all sorts of things, including one Grok image which showed Mario smoking and drinking on the beach. Some fan art has reportedly been caught in the crossfire as well.
The Verge’s senior editor Tom Warren was originally made aware of this when he received a notice on ‘X’ about certain content being removed from his account following a DMCA complaint.
Nintendo or Tracer haven’t provided a comment about these takedowns. This latest story follows Nintendo and The Pokémon Company last week filing a lawsuit against the Palworld creator Pocketpair.
