Facepalm: If there's one person in the gaming industry who might be well served by staying away from social media, it's Randy Pitchford. The Gearbox boss just added to his history of ill-thought-out posts with one that showed an AI-generated image of an AI working at his company. It might have been a bit of fun on his part, but the post got so much hate that Pitchford had to continually emphasize Gearbox's no-AI policy.

The situation started on May 3, when Pitchford's X post showed an AI-generated image. "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)," he wrote.

In a time when most people are strongly against generative AI being used in games – or any medium, for that matter – it seems strange Pitchford thought his post would be a good idea.

As you'd expect, nearly all of the 430 responses to the post were not as positive or jovial as Pitchford seemingly expected.

One of the most liked replies noted that Pitchford's post did not help rumors that the latest Borderlands 4 patch notes had been AI-generated. Pitchford said that the company's policy was to never use AI for anything in any professional capacity "that the customer could see."

Someone else pointed out that the BL4 notes are full of mistakes, misspellings, and erroneous descriptions of items, such as a shield that was described as a grenade. Pitchford said these were due to "human error."

Pitchford used the same "no-AI policy" line verbatim when responding to several other people who argued his use of the technology suggested Gearbox would have no issues doing the same in its games.

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Pitchford also repeated the same excuse several times: that the post illustrated just how "dumb and silly" AI-generated content can be, and that anyone who didn't realize this was missing the point. He eventually posted a lengthy statement claiming he was "inspired by friends who were "goofing around with making [AI] try to make pictures of itself."

"My friends I was with for lunch earlier produced some funny things with similar prompts for themselves and I wanted to see what bullshit it would generate as an idea of a self identity because the idea of an AI even having an identity is nonsense," Pitchford wrote. "The result was somehow more embarrassingly hilarious than I expected and I wanted to share that."

Pitchford also posted a poll result that showed he considered his behavior on X to fall into the description of "I'm cool: don't comment." Make of that what you will.

Pitchford has a history of showing off his poor PR skills. Last September, he addressed the Borderlands 4 performance issues by arguing it was "a premium game made for premium gamers," suggesting the fault lay with those lacking high-end hardware. He also told those complaining about a lack of optimization to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

Pitchford also got into trouble by claiming "real fans" would pay $80 for Borderlands 4 if it launched with that price tag. Thankfully for everyone (and him), it didn't.