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How we cover AI-assisted projects - GBAtemp community check-in

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It’s about that time of year again where I check in with the community to see if we can get the front page aligned with what people are interested in knowing and what people are interested in talking about. As the title might have given away, there’s one topic more hot than most at the moment, and that’s AI.

I am a C++ developer by trade, and my place of employ has just started to roll out Claude licences for those interested, so the topic of AI assisted programming is very much on my mind. I’m not just going to go out there and say “AI bad”. I don’t necessarily think it’s a productive conversation to have. The reality is that we’re going to see more projects that make use of it in some form, and some are likely to warrant attention.

Going forwards, I think it’s important that we highlight when projects we do feature make use of AI, and to what extent if such information is available. My hope is that this will strike a reasonable balance of being able to share projects that might look interesting, and giving people who want to avoid AI related projects a simple indicator.

Obviously not every project is going to be so open with their usage, and we have no intention of starting witch hunts by deep diving code and looking for em dashes in the comments. The aim here is to make whatever public information there is accessible for people reading here, and just make things a touch clearer for the people who are looking for that kind of disclaimer.

With that aside though, I am interested to know what the general consensus is among the user base. Are you open to playing ports assisted by AI if it’s the only port available, or happens to offer something unique? Do you draw the line at vibe coding, or do you avoid any project that has Claude listed as a contributor? We sadly don’t have access to polls on the front page any more, but I will make sure to keep up with any replies as they come in.
 
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Alot of people don't like AI for reasons some valid some not.
I'm a bit depressed because it's clear my job is going to be automated in the near future. I'm struggling with that after seeing how my company is adopting it.

The gates note on AI is a must read on how we are entering the turbulent era of AI: https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make.
However AI is here to stay, i don't think the old world is coming back. Newer smarter models and chipsets that use 1000x less resources like taalas are on the way. The era is going to change. Stripe, Linus Torvalds, and a shit ton more developers are using it and its real and its helpful and it's GOOD.

I don't think the AI discussions love/hate are productive for niche site like GBAtemp. If people want to have them, it should be elsewhere.
if something is slop human or ai, then yea we should avoid it.
The bigger problem is the way people view signal vs noise on a good or bad product/service is probably going to change and have too. The old way and heuristics used to tell good project from bad project are not going to work and people need to adapt.

I've pretty sure if I see a AI agentic public code repo without ai agents skills or a soul.md/claude.md/agents.md , test suite, agentic harness, It's easy to see it's a bad AI project. If I see a non frontier model in the commit history, it probably gonna be slop too. Stuff like this is probably going to be the new way to look at code in the future.
 
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Gamehopper said:
are you at all worried about the sanity or the amount of time wasted or unnecessary pressure put on devs by people who are against AI who "react way too emotionally" to the beyond where they lost all sense of reasoning? Are you at all worried that this may lead to some people sending developers "death threats" which people who are against AI have done. I am referring to the "clinically insane" ones not you people who have the ability to keep yourselves together.
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First and foremost; I believe that good journalism requires disclosing as much relevant information as possible to allow readers to have a complete understanding of what is being covered. If anyone is emotionally charged enough to send someone death threats over their use of AI, then they probably would do that regardless of whether or not it was covered.

And as a side note; I feel like developers are doing themselves a disservice when they either don’t disclose or worse, outright deny obvious AI usage (the James Pond collection being a recent example). Any project worth looking at wouldn’t need to hide their AI use to avoid controversy; anyone seriously harassing devs about it is gonna do it whether they disclose it or not. They can only benefit from being honest and open about it.
 
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Vixi said:
What makes you think I haven't been doing and wanting those things until now?
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Kitocco said:
Okay. I care about what’s going on in Memphis because I’m black, myself. And I know eventually these things come for us all.
Way ahead of you on wanting solar & nuclear, and blaming the people rigging things in their favor (as shown by mentioning Nvidia & Palantir)
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That's nice. But if you do, then your argument makes even less sense. Because you understand the problem, and yet you are choosing to place the blame elsewhere.

Vixi, you admit yourself you are fine with locally run AI for this reason. Who's to say the authors of a program are not self-hosting theirs? Why should the ones that are be at fault for the ones who aren't?

If you don't support them, fine, but the justification isn't there.

Vixi said:
And what makes you think Toei Animation used a render farm to animate Transformers The Movie?
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I did not say that. I did not say Transformers. I did not say "all animated movies". I said that artists at CGI studios used render farms, and that is all. The point is, there are plenty of things computers do that are bad for the environment because of external factors, and this should be a wake-up call to address the cause, not the effect.

Kitocco said:
And that’s not what LARP means.
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Live Action RolePlay - to pretend
It would be if my initial assumptions held up.
 
Last edited by bonkmaykr,
Voxel is cool and I've been playing it for hours. It is buggy but functional enough to maintain my interest.

AI projects can be fun and interesting. AI gives the Steve Jobs-types of the world a way to demonstrate their vision.

The environmental costs of AI are terrible and that's undeniable. I don't share the outrage of others for the sources the models are trained on. I always kinda assumed that actually useful AI models would be trained in this way (without permission), because it's not practical to quickly create such a revolutionary technology by asking millions of people for their individual permission first.
 
Mixtape said:
Thank you for saying this. It more succinctly sums up a major point that I was trying to make in my response a few pages ago. Regardless of what staff come up with for a long-term approach to covering AI-assisted projects, it needs to be supplemented with an effective approach for incentivizing constructive, actionable discussions about AI's impacts specifically in the scene rather than entrenched bickering. There's just too much tension surrounding the subject for large-scale, "broad impact" discussions to not devolve into ideological conflict and take up all of the air in the room.

To restate my own opinion on how to best deal with that, I personally feel that the forum would be better off keeping the conversation limited to the specific ways that AI damages specific projects. In other words, I feel that we'd all benefit from keeping the discourse centered around the project itself and keeping the broader subjects that err into off-topic territory in their appropriate channels. To your point though, I can also acknowledge that there's real reason to be concerned that people are simply too frustrated to reasonably moderate themselves. Unfortunately, I don't have a good solution for that that doesn't place the full burden of defining what crosses the line on the moderation team.


See Scarlet's post from yesterday:
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That would be nice, and it probably couldn’t be implemented without AI help—provided AI has progressed enough to do it to enough people’s satisfaction, and you can overcome concerns about AI censorship.

I bet most people would be concerned about AI putting its thumb on the scale. But we should be concerned about anybody’s thumb on the scale, not just AI’s.

AI is empowering people. You can’t control who have access and what they do with it. Just like you can’t prevent every mass shooting once you let people have guns—it’s the people who aim and pull the trigger. You can’t exactly ask people to accurately declare that they aren’t psychopaths, right?

It’s really no different from a surge of people who can code. Many of the newcomers aren’t very good at it, and some outright suck at it without even realizing it themselves. Others don’t really care, or even worse, genuinely think they’re great and already operating at an expert level.

The experts suffered a round of hurt from Google Search, and this AI wave is probably going to hurt them even more. The experts in coding were fine with google search but this time they suffer just like other kind of experts. They will feel they have lost some of the respect they use to enjoy.

It's going to be harder for real expert to tell the difference between real and fake expertise and for most ordinary people it may just be impossible.
 
Last edited by TomSwitch,
bonkmaykr said:
That's nice. But if you do, then your argument makes even less sense. Because you understand the problem, and yet you are choosing to place the blame elsewhere.
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Because investors & shareholders tend to research where their money goes, and a high "user" count is a nice boasting & persuasion point of companies to get more funding. Especially "daily" or "recurrent users". Kind of like it's a binary metric they can easily abuse to manufacture consent...

I was answering some else's request for sources on how the technology is causing harm to other people. As I've stated earlier, my ire lies with the people pumping industrial amounts of "content" for easy turnover & profit, flooding the internet with vapid sludge. If not, I'd have thrown projects like GameNative & ClusterTune in the fire. But I didn't.

You're well within your rights to shrug off other people's struggles. Just don't complain when someone says "nuthin to do with me" to you when the data center comes to your town.
bonkmaykr said:
Live Action RolePlay - to pretend
It would be if my initial assumptions held up.
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I don't like throwing an actual hobby that takes putting yourself out there (sometimes in public no less) under the bus when words like "poser" & "tourist" already exist. And that's before the broadness of that definition.
 
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GengarsGhostlyGiggles said:
Alot of people don't like AI for reasons some valid some not.
I'm a bit depressed because it's clear my job is going to be automated in the near future. I'm struggling with that after seeing how my company is adopting it.

The gates note on AI is a must read on how we are entering the turbulent era of AI: https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make.
However AI is here to stay, i don't think the old world is coming back. Newer smarter models and chipsets that use 1000x less resources like taalas are on the way. The era is going to change. Stripe, Linus Torvalds, and a shit ton more developers are using it and its real and its helpful and it's GOOD.

I don't think the AI discussions love/hate are productive for niche site like GBAtemp. If people want to have them, it should be elsewhere.
if something is slop human or ai, then yea we should avoid it.
The bigger problem is the way people view signal vs noise on a good or bad product/service is probably going to change and have too. The old way and heuristics used to tell good project from bad project are not going to work and people need to adapt.

I've pretty sure if I see a AI agentic public code repo without ai agents skills or a soul.md/claude.md/agents.md , test suite, agentic harness, It's easy to see it's a bad AI project. If I see a non frontier model in the commit history, it probably gonna be slop too. Stuff like this is probably going to be the new way to look at code in the future.
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AI-driven change is coming to everyone. There will be discussion everywhere people gather and talk. GBATemp is one such place. It will, of course, be shaped by the composition of the people who gather there.
 
bonkmaykr said:
That's nice. But if you do, then your argument makes even less sense. Because you understand the problem, and yet you are choosing to place the blame elsewhere.

Vixi, you admit yourself you are fine with locally run AI for this reason. Who's to say the authors of a program are not self-hosting theirs? Why should the ones that are be at fault for the ones who aren't?

If you don't support them, fine, but the justification isn't there.
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Over-generalization is a factor. It may be consensus that AI has collected training data without permission.

But to be pedantic, that doesn't prove a specific project used an unethical AI model.
 
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Lumstar said:
Over-generalization is a factor. It may be consensus that AI has collected training data without permission.

But to be pedantic, that doesn't prove a specific project used an unethical AI model.
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Human-only, AI-augmented humans, pure AI—what is the real difference that matters?

What do you mean by an “unethical AI model”? Do you mean an AI that doesn’t follow the licensing model of open-source projects? It’s the human behind the prompt, isn’t it? Or do you mean the AI model itself can go rogue and act unethically on its own?
 
TomSwitch said:
Human-only, AI-augmented humans, pure AI—what is the real difference that matters?

What do you mean by an “unethical AI model”? Do you mean an AI that doesn’t follow the licensing model of open-source projects? It’s the human behind the prompt, isn’t it? Or do you mean the AI model itself can go rogue and act unethically on its own?
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In this context, an "unethical" AI model was trained on data that was collected without permission.
 
Lumstar said:
In this context, an "unethical" AI model was trained on data that was collected without permission.
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You mean humans use AI on their projects, and AI learns from that and becomes better, or just steals the code, lock, stock, and barrel? I think learning on the job is absolutely fine, just as it is for human employees working on any project. When company secrets are a concern, there’s this thing called an NDA. That’s obviously missing with AI, for sure but no body in their right mind would trust company secret to an AI in the cloud.

I believe AI has gone from only learn from data that the AI company feed them to learning on the job for a while already.

I suppose one could lobby AI companies to add a “Do not use the learning outside of this work” flag. The alternative is to buy the hardware and run it locally.

It is clear that this is not their first rodeo for many task that they were asked to do and that is a good thing in general. AI has gone from an inexperience intern to an employee hired from the competition.
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Imagine a company that offers professional software services through a subscription fee. You are subject to a daily man-hour limit and a weekly man-hour limit, but you only have to pay $20 per month. This service is highly subsidized.

If you are a software professional you will feel like unfair competition. If you are user of the service you will have more project a lot more than if you have to hire human
 
Last edited by TomSwitch,
I don't play ports if "ai" was used in its development. "ai" is a marketing phrase and euphemism for plagiarism generators. all "ai" use is plagiarism. the only "ethical" or "responsible" use of "ai" is no use. if gbatemp is cool to become a webspace that accepts and promotes plagiarism, then I'd have no reason to come here anymore 🤷
 
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poprox said:
I don't play ports if "ai" was used in its development. "ai" is a marketing phrase and euphemism for plagiarism generators. all "ai" use is plagiarism. the only "ethical" or "responsible" use of "ai" is no use. if gbatemp is cool to become a webspace that accepts and promotes plagiarism, then I'd have no reason to come here anymore 🤷
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What about sampling, and remixes? Are those plagiarism?
 
Vixi said:
high electricity prices and datacenter pollution.
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Both of these are solved with proper voting

Why are their profits privatized but not their costs?
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Dartinho said:
This is not a harmless technology and we all know it. It's time to face it.
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One fallacy here

While you are correct it is none harmless. You are being a bit too short sighted. This is only one minor part of the big picture of pollution. The fingers are being pointed at the wrong folks

Us non billionaires carbon footprint is damn near nonexistant. Even with the AI use to account for. Compared to what they use each and every day. Just by one or two billionaires.

Which is where it comes back down to voting proper. Its a class war at the end of the day. We all need to argue each other, and give up more and more. While they can follow less rules and do whatever they want

While we are limiting ourselves day2day in various ways to save the planet. Without change there there is literally nothing we can do
 
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bonkmaykr said:
It is not AI's problem, if you were paying attention. I don't know what would've made you think this was about me in that context.
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bonkmaykr said:
This is literally the definition of "not my problem".
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Your wording of “not my problem” was why.

Sure, it’s not the technology itself at fault. It’s the major players using enough electricity to power a small town.
From what I’ve seen, it’s either a general disclaimer like with WiiCompiled (which seems fine, I just don’t have a PAL copy), or the usual suspects for agents on a GitHub page; Codex, Claude, and Copilot. Which can be run locally, from what I’ve glanced.
 

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