Credit: Getty Images

Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term “vibe coding” just over a year ago, we’ve seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. One such vibe-coded project, Gaming Alexandria Researcher, launched over the weekend as what coder Dustin Hubbard called an effort to help organize the hundreds of scanned Japanese gaming magazines he’s helped maintain at clearinghouse Gaming Alexandria over the years, alongside machine translations of their OCR text.

A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours.

“I sincerely apologize,” Hubbard wrote in his apology post. “My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we’ve never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI.”

“Something I never would have dreamed could exist”

Since its launch in 2015, Gaming Alexandria has grown into a comprehensive, Japan-focused clearinghouse for video game history, including everything from high-quality box art scans and rare video game prototypes to classic magazine-published BASIC programs. The site is also known for its massive collection of Japanese game magazine scans, some dating all the way back to the early ’70s.

Writing on Patreon this weekend, Hubbard said he has long been tinkering with an improved automated OCR and translation process that could help turn more of those magazine scans into useful tools for Western researchers. And when he put Google Gemini AI model to the task recently, he said he was “blown away” by the results. While he still recommended using a professional human translator before citing these magazines in any scholarly research, he said the output from the Gemini AI tool “gets you a large percentage of the way there quickly.”

Inspired by those results, Hubbard set to work on a self-described “vibe coded” interface to view the original PDF scans alongside their AI-generated text translations for easy comparison and editing. The result was the Gaming Alexandria Researcher tool, posted to GitHub on Friday and shared with the site’s Patreon backers as a “beta” on Saturday. The tool, which runs locally on Windows, Mac, or Linux, can search, download, and edit Gaming Alexandria’s files from the cloud or sort through local files stored on your own machine.

Hubbard said that he made use of some of Gaming Alexandria’s Patreon funds (which are currently listed at over $250 per month) to help build the project itself and for the Gemini-powered transcriptions and translations it uses. That process “costs about 50 cents to $1.50 per magazine to process which isn’t too bad depending on their size,” he wrote.

A look at the Gaming Alexandria Researcher interface, showing an original Japanese scan alongside the AI translation of the text.
Credit: Gaming Alecandria

“This app has been something I never would have dreamed could exist,” Hubbard enthused. “Now I can finally read and enjoy these Japanese magazines I’ve been scanning for years. A large part of that is due to your believing in my work and funding me so thank you so much for that.”

“It’s worthless and destructive”

Not everyone was as excited as Hubbard, though. “I’m very, very disappointed to see [Gaming Alexandria], one of the foremost organizations for preserving game history, promoting the use of AI translation and using Patreon funds to pay for AI licenses,” game designer and Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote in a popular social media message over the weekend. “I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization.”

Nichols later deleted that message (archived here), saying he was “uncomfortable with the scale of reposts and anger” it had aroused in the community. On the substance, though, Nichols said he was still concerned about the inevitable inaccuracies that would be introduced by Gemini’s translations, making them nearly useless for scholarship.

In a follow-up post, Nichols said he was uncomfortable with “Patreon money being spent on AI subscriptions to make untrustworthy translations, that are promoted as if they’re worth reading or valid sources of historical info. … It’s worthless and destructive: these translations are like looking at history through a clownhouse mirror.”

Nichols wasn’t alone in expressing those kinds of concerns. “It strikes me as irresponsible to use the privileged position where we have first hand access to this genuinely novel information to just be okay with something that kinda works, sorta,” user Joey wrote on the Gaming Alexandria Discord. Others on social media piped up to say that the project had “damaged [the site’s] reputation,” or had “burn[ed] all their good faith with the video gaming community.”

For some supporters, though, using machine translations—including ones aided by AI models—is a practical necessity given the size of the task at hand. “There’s no world in which they could ever get hundreds of thousands of pages translated by hand,” game preservationist Chris Chapman wrote on social media. “Error-prone searchability is more useful to more people than none at all.”

“Famitsu alone is over 1,900 issues, each with [a hundred-plus] pages,” journalist and author Felipe Pepe noted. “That’s one magazine from one country. [Human translation] would be ideal, but it’s impossible.”

On the Gaming Alexandria Discord, user asie wrote that people who use tools like Google Lens or DeepL are already using AI-powered OCR and translation tools. At this point, these kinds of tools are “just a fact of reality,” they added.

This 1973 issue of Japan’s Amusement Industry magazine is just one of hundreds that Gaming Alexandria has scanned over the years.
Credit: Gaming Alexandria

“Show some empathy and grace…”

In his apology post Sunday, Hubbard acknowledged that many supporters were “shocked and angered” by his efforts on the Researcher vibe coding effort and said he “should have reached out before using Patreon funds for that project.” Hubbard said he’d be using personal funds to replace the Patreon money that had been used so far, and that in the future “no Patreon dollars will be used to fund AI.” He added that he is just “one cog in the wheel” of the Gaming Alexandria site, and that other members of the community shouldn’t be punished for what was a “personal side project.”

(In response to a request for further comment from Ars Technica, Hubbard said that “we’re currently working on a statement we hope to have out in the next week regarding all this.”)

For some, this apology was too little too late, especially since Researcher remains online via GitHub. “That first [apology] seemed like ‘I’m still going to do it, but I won’t use Patreon money,’ which to me is a distinction without a point,” one social media user wrote. “I encourage anyone currently supporting Gaming Alexandria on Patreon to pull their funding until they completely back away from ever using any kind of genAI ever again,” another added. “This is an unacceptable response that doesn’t seem to understand that ANY usage of it is unacceptable.”

At the same time, even many who were opposed to the project spoke out to defend Hubbard and his long-standing efforts in the game-preservation community. “[Hubbard] has been a really nice & thoughtful guy in every encounter I’ve had with him,” Zelda archivist Melora Hart wrote on the History of Hyrule social media account. “Every single human on Earth can get excited and carried away with things.”

In the end, while the game-preservation community might not be ready to embrace AI-assisted translations just yet, that doesn’t mean they’re ready to excommunicate someone like Hubbard just for trying. “Gaming Alexandria is our load-bearing pillar for access to Japanese scans and [Hubbard] the hardest-working guy I know in game preservation, so I’d really appreciate it if we didn’t destroy him with a dogpile over his vibe coding project please,” Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi wrote on social media. “Show some empathy and grace if you disagree with it.”