ABSAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Hi Rivals plushy (and other) fans, We've been at PAX West the last few days and just got caught up on some the AI discourse around Symbiote Studio's posts while we were gone. We saw that people were upset and understand where you're coming from. We don't support GenAI and we know a lot of you don't either. For background on their latest round of plushies that they posted about - real humans from both of our teams have spent a lot of time working on them. The process involves concept art, notes, and redraws from Andy on our team along with fabric work from Kay and others on the Symbiote team to sew prototypes and test plushies. We wanted to clarify here that all of our work on the plushies between both teams is human-made, and that's how we plan to keep things going forward too. That makes this use of AI in their posts a bit confusing since it wasn't even related to the plushies themselves or promoting the plushies, and it's certainly not involved in our working process together. We've reached out to them about no longer using AI generated content and about how it's important to us going forward. We'd like to give them another chance in case they weren't aware of our stance before, but we'll keep monitoring the situation. Our hope is that we can continue making cool Rivals plushies together.