An AI-powered copyright tool is taking down AI-generated Mario pictures

Dozens of X posts containing images of Mario — including an AI-generated picture of the plumber holding a beer and a cigarette, created by The Verge using xAI’s Grok — were removed after a company called Tracer apparently used AI to identify the images and serve takedown notices on behalf of Nintendo.

According to an email received by The Verge’s Tom Warren, a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice was issued to X by “customer success manager” Ben Arzen of Tracer, which offers AI-powered services to companies purported to identify trademark and copyright violations online. Here’s the image that got Tom’s post removed.

The takedown request included links to other posts that were identified as having infringed on Nintendo’s Mario copyrights. As the posts are now gone, we can’t see what the pictures looked like, but at least one other was apparently made with Grok — a tool that’s extremely lax about guardrails for offensive or infringing content. One of the accounts listed by X posted last week that they had received a notice for AI-generated images that showed Luigi and Waluigi as IDF soldiers.

But it seems like whatever process is being used here is also scooping up fan art posts. One of the accounts that was listed in the DMCA request, OtakuRockU, posted that they were warned their account could be terminated over “a drawing of Mario,” while another, PoyoSilly, posted an edited version of a drawing they said was identified in a notice. (The new one had a picture of a vaguely Mario-resembling doll inserted over a part of the image, obscuring the original part containing Mario.)

Neither Nintendo nor Tracer responded to our request for comment by press time, and it’s not clear how much involvement (if any) Nintendo had in the process. The company is notoriously litigious; it sued the creators of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator into oblivion and is currently involved in another lawsuit accusing the creators of the Pokemon-like Palworld game of violating its copyrights. It’s also apparently used third-party enforcement tools in the past, sometimes leading to confusion and accusations of copyright trolling — as with a series of notices over Nintendo-related content in the sandbox game Garry’s Mod.

If you’ve gotten an email telling you a drawing or AI-generated Mario image was removed because of a similar notice, do let us know.