Dozens of X-posts with pictures of Mario – including an AI-generated image of the plumber with a beer and a cigarette in his hand, created by The edge using Grok from xAI – were removed after a company called Tracer apparently used AI to identify the images and deliver cease and desist letters on behalf of Nintendo.
According to an email received from The edgeTom Warren, a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice was sent to X by “Customer Success Manager” Ben Arzen of Tracer. Tracer provides AI-powered services to businesses that purport to identify trademark and copyright infringement online. Here's the image that caused Tom's post to be taken down.
The takedown request included links to other posts that allegedly infringed Nintendo's Mario copyrights. Since the posts have now disappeared, we can't see what the images looked like, but at least one more appears to have been created using Grok – a tool that is very lax about safeguards for offensive or infringing content. One of the accounts listed by X posted last week that it had received a notice for AI-generated images that depicted Luigi and Waluigi as IDF soldiers.
But it seems the process used here also collects fan art posts. One of the accounts listed in the DMCA request, OtakuRockU, posted that it had been warned that its account could be terminated for “a drawing of Mario,” while another, PoyoSilly, posted an edited version of a drawing that was supposedly mentioned in a notice. (The new account had an image of a Mario-like doll superimposed over part of the image, obscuring the original Mario part.)
Neither Nintendo nor Tracer responded to our request for comment by press time, and it is not clear how involved Nintendo was in the lawsuit (if at all). The company is notoriously litigious; it sued the developers of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator into oblivion and is currently embroiled in another lawsuit involving the developers of the Pokemon-How Palworld game to infringe its copyrights. It has also apparently used third-party enforcement tools in the past, sometimes leading to confusion and accusations of copyright trolling – as with a number of notices about Nintendo-related content in the sandbox game Garry's Mod.
If you received an email telling you that a drawing or AI-generated Mario image was removed due to a similar notice, please let us know.