Don't worry, the image is a click-bait.
Pokémon Workshop is a community centered around Pokémon fan making. That means artists and coders lives in the same community sharing a common passion.
AI (or gen-AI) has become really efficient at copying human work. For some people, it's a nice tool. For other people, it's a disaster. The main reason is that we're back to the time the printing press was invented; AI is enabling mass plagiarism.
To address this, we're issuing two rules, one about the real world, one about people and consent.
When is it acceptable to use (gen-)AI?
The Anti-AI would say "never," and we could agree with them. Regardless, we cannot control what other people do to achieve their results. Some people may use brush and macros, which are a few steps away from gen-AI. It's really hard to tell when something really good has been made using AI in the workflow, so our rule will be the following:
Content that is exclusively AI generated is forbidden.
What "exclusively" means is nuanced, but the general rule of thumb is that if a prompt(s) generated the whole content, and no changes were made to that content (swapping colors does not count as a change), then it is exclusively AI generated.
In which context can (gen-)AI be used
For art, it's pretty simple, you do not train on other artwork that do not explicitly grant permission to do so. For code we will, as well, apply the same rule:
If the source material do not explicitly grant permission to use AI over it, you do not use AI over it
It's a simple consent rule that we have to explain, the main reason is the following: Software licenses were created in an era when AI was not considered as realistic; thus, AI had never been the subject of the licenses. Although you may argue that licenses such as MIT allow copies and modifications at will, we would say that these licenses were designed with humans in mind; thus, they do not explicitly grant (gen-)AI the right to copy or modify code at will (if it even has any will).
What if Pokémon Workshop project's allows (gen-)AI in their workflow?
The fact that our projects may allow (gen-)AI in their workflow does not grant you the permission to use it in anything that touches it. The previous rules still apply, here's a matrix to understand it:
| Does it grants AI use? | Can you use AI |
|---|---|
| No | No |
| Unspecified | No |
| With rules | You must follow their rules |
| Explicitly says yes | Yes |
Here's few examples:
| Subject | Does it grants AI use? | Can you use AI |
|---|---|---|
| Someone's artwork | No | No |
| Someone's artwork | Unspecified | No |
| Someone's artwork | Explicitly says yes | Yes |
| Pokémon SDK source code | Yes | Only on PSDK source code |
| Pokémon Studio source code | Unspecified | No |
| A PSDK plugin | No | No |
| A PSDK plugin | Unspecified | No |
| A PSDK plugin | Explicitly says yes | Yes |
| A 3rd party Library | No | No |
| A 3rd party Library | Unspecified | No |
| A 3rd party Library | With rules | You must follow their rules |
| A 3rd party Library | Explicitly says yes | Yes |
Note: When in doubt, whoever uses (gen-)AI in their workflow must prove that the source AI used explicitly grants permission for AI to train on the source material. If you want to avoid issues, you must run models you have personally trained on hardware you own.
Note: When a project grants AI permission to train or get used for some purpose, that project's license MUST be applied. For instance, the license cannot be modified and if the license requires related code to be open source, the generated code must be open source.
Sources
Hero image is a partial screenshot of this email: Linus Torvalds to Laurent Pinchart on Tue, 13 Oct 2026 at 13:16