Public sentiment around generative AI has been tanking as of late, and few corners of the internet hate the controversial technology more than gamers. So Gearbox Entertainment studio head Randy Pitchford had some explaining to do when he recently shared AI slop on main. In response to Borderlands 4 fans’ displeasure, he unofficially outlined the studio’s guidelines on using AI, including a ban on using it for anything that might end up in one of its games.
“ChatGPT has no information from me about anything from my work because 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 wrote on X on May 4. “I’m using my personal phone and not my work computer (which is isolated from personal systems).”
I use ChatGPT essentially as a search engine. I recently started fooling around with the image generation as some friends were goofing around with making it try to make pictures of itself.
Prompt was: “Make a picture of yourself as if you worked at my company, Gearbox… https://t.co/tXHDeS3yDr
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) May 4, 2026
The Gearbox Entertainment cofounder was being dragged for sharing an AI-generated “selfie” based on his interactions which ChatGPT. “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),” Pitchford posted on May 3.
The mentions were not kind. “The only people that like Ai are old people that don’t know the difference and executives that want to use it to reduce head count and cut costs,” wrote one person. “This seriously makes me afraid your company is willing to use AI in the making of future games, and I will be seriously critical of any future Gearbox games directly because of this post,” wrote another.
Patch notes that sounded off
While the studio head encouraged his followers to just “be cool and enjoy silly things,” Borderlands 4 fans were particularly sensitive after accusations that recent patch notes may have been written with the help of AI. A blog post outlining the April 30 update included lines like “The Rifts are meant to be scary, but not confusing!” and “We want fights to be both fair and fun.” The repetition throughout the patch notes of generic phrasing raised some alarm bells on the Borderlands subreddit and X.
“Whole thing reads like its AI written I’m kinda stunned,” wrote one player. “I wasn’t really buying into the AI Patch Notes thing at first, but re-reading them now and they sound very very different to literally any other notes they’ve released so far,” wrote another. A thread listed a number of places where the patch notes seemed to substitute incorrect words like “acid” instead of the in-game term “Corrosive.”
We have Corrosive element, not Acid. pic.twitter.com/GKhrc3pMKE
— EpicNNG (@EpicNNG) April 30, 2026
Pitchford posting his AI slop days later added fresh fuel to the conspiracy theory. “Posting this right after people were questioning if the patch notes were AI is crazy,” wrote Borderlands streamer LilGasmask. This is the comment that prompted the Gearbox boss to reveal the studio’s ban on using AI for anything that could be consumer-facing. Pitchford said he posted the image after he and some friends had fun prompting AI to generate “selfies,” the latest ChatGPT fad that’s definitely not a sign of any tech bubbles bursting anytime soon.
“We’re not machines,” Pitchford wrote on X. “We are people. We aren’t perfect. We are messy. Especially me. Maybe relax a little and have some fun? Creating entertainment is my life mission. You are a customer, presumably, because you want to be entertained. If your idea of being entertained is to spend your time posting what you posted, you do you, I guess. Thanks for supporting our human-made entertainment, warts and all!”
