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.
 
environmental hazards and stealing from humans
AI is probably going to be a major pain—and perhaps even a matter of life and death—for many people, much worse than social media. But helping people make free games or free tools for gaming certainly isn’t one of the things I’d worry about.

PS: There won't be many games that remain completely free of AI involvement, just as you don't really have a choice about living in a world untouched by the influence of social media.

I would like to have a “No AI-generated” video switch on YouTube, though. Also, a “Fact-checked by AI” switch would be nice too. I’d certainly try it to see whether those blatantly obvious fakes could be screened out.

To not waste time or money on bad games check the reviews.
 
Last edited by TomSwitch,
My take is that while GBAtemp should cover every homebrew game and port, regardless of whether it's been written with or without LLM, it would be nice to give more space to human-coded projects. How? Well, the way I would do it is to report all projects produced with LLM support into a single news post (something like "Best games and ports of this week generated with AI-assistance"), whereas continuing to report fully human-generated projects into a well-deserved individual post.

Why? Well, because LLM allows people to produce more with less effort, and what I'd like to praise is not just the end result, but the effort it took to achieve it.
 
My take is that while GBAtemp should cover every homebrew game and port, regardless of whether it's been written with or without LLM, it would be nice to give more space to human-coded projects. How? Well, the way I would do it is to report all projects produced with LLM support into a single news post (something like "Best games and ports of this week generated with AI-assistance"), whereas continuing to report fully human-generated projects into a well-deserved individual post.

Why? Well, because LLM allows people to produce more with less effort, and what I'd like to praise is not just the end result, but the effort it took to achieve it.
Nobody is stopping anyone from having a “Handmade” logo. You’re welcome to make it bold and prominent so everyone is clear about it, rather than asking silly questions about why easy features (at least as far as AI is concerned) are missing.

A well-made homebrew is simply well-made. Whether the author uses AI or not makes absolutely no difference to me. If you care about it that much, just ask whether it is “Handmade”—and remember, they don’t owe you an answer. Assuming it isn’t handmade unless explicitly stated otherwise is perfectly sensible.

Why do you care so much about effort? Do you also need someone to declare that they’re not gifted? Or perhaps say, “Please don’t thank me too much, because this was easy for me”? This isn’t school.

If someone comes here looking for praise, they clearly won't stay for long, because they won't get much of it here.
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In a manner of speaking. The engineering side isn't what's controversial.
For instance automated tools like web search engines require in essence rudimentary "intellect" to not run amok, returning useless results.
Treat AI like a new employee and you can’t go too wrong. The key difference is that humans don’t become smarter as quickly as AI does. AI felt like an intern not that long ago; now it feels more like a new hire coming from the competition. Soon, they’ll feel like talent you poach from the competition.

Last year’s AI was dumb—good mainly for cheap labor. This year’s AI learns fast, and after some investment in training, they become surprisingly productive. Next year, you may just find that you can’t live without them.
 
Last edited by TomSwitch,
environmental hazards and stealing from humans
The environmental hazard of slightly heating some water in a heat exchange? Stop regurgitating propaganda. Your apps have been doing the same thing for decades and the issues are already mitigated by controls - because they have to be. It's not the wild west.

And learning isn't stealing. I'm not having another argument about what steeling is. The last one (piracy isn't theft) took a quarter century to settle, and there are still holdouts. Learn more words.

If you have actual concerns, let's talk about beef, almonds, coffee, shampoo, smartphones, golf, gasoline, diamonds... a lot of the stuff you can see has a horror story behind it. AI is one of the least harmful things to enter the world in half a century, and it has the potential to solve the world's biggest problems.
 

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