No, Pokémon Didn’t Just Announce Generative AI For The Trading Card Game

The Pokémon Company is holding a contest on Google’s Kaggle platform that invites teams to write AI capable of playing Trading Card Game simulations. The competition will culminate in a tournament later this year and offers a cash prize for the winning team. Creating an AI for Pokémon is more complex than for games such as chess or shogi because card draws introduce randomness and cards interact through status effects, elemental affinities and other layered relationships.

The contest asks coders to develop models that play Pokémon cards and pit them against one another; organizers have published a full rundown on the official website. Some fans reacted negatively when they saw “AI” and “Pokémon cards” mentioned together, with critics suggesting the contest could be a way to crowdsource engineering.

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