Greater Than Zero: The Anti-AI Pushback On Gaming Preservation Efforts Makes No Sense

from the the-enemy-of-the-good dept

There is an old axiom you will have heard of before: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we wanted to boil this down to a math equation, it might be described as something like: 0 < any positive integer. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, typically, until you add in a dash of near-religious ideology into the equation. And that’s where the anti-AI crowd comes in.

Dustin Hubbard heads up Gaming Alexandria, a site dedicated to the preservation of obscure corners of video game history. Focused less on the actual games themselves, Gaming Alexandria instead focuses its efforts on media surrounding those games, such as manuals, box art, and old gaming journalism outputs. To that end, Hubbard’s group has amassed an impressive number of Japanese magazine scans throughout the years. To make this content useful to researchers elsewhere, he built a low-footprint app to make those scans searchable and, more importantly, to translate them. A Patreon page and subscriptions partially funded all of this.

And that’s what had Hubbard issuing apologies over this past weekend.

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.”

And this is where we enter the realm of the silly. I’m not some AI evangelist. I fully recognize that there are error and other problems with AI… and I imagine there always will be, to some extent. AI is not always, or perhaps even mostly, the right tool to use. Nor will it always have benefits that outweigh problems it creates for we human beings.

But a positive number is greater than zero. This was a tool that suddenly made all of this culture content accessible to a wider range of people. Before it was not available to anyone that didn’t have a high-level of knowledge on the Japanese language. Translation errors also happen with human translators, too. We need only look at the ancient religious texts, and the very real wars started over their translations, to understand that.

Hubbard himself attempted to make this point over the weekend.

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.

“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.”

The negative responses he got for all of this are wild. There were calls to boycott the project. Calls to rescind Patreon subscriptions. Max Nichols, a game designer, cancelled his own Patreon membership and decried the project as “worthless and destructive”, likening any output generated using AI-based translations as “looking at history through a clownhouse mirror.”

I would argue that I’d rather get that look than get no look at all. I’d also argue that we need to see very specific examples of AI-created translation errors to understand just how grounded these criticisms are in reality, versus all of this being a case of overstating the case.

Some fans of the site, at least, managed to understand the context here.

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.

Again, any positive number is greater than zero. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Something is better than nothing.

I don’t know how to explain the negative responses here as anything other than a ideological commitment to disliking anything that even remotely touches upon artificial intelligence. Absolute moral stances certainly have their place, but they sure ought to be used sparingly.

And this particular stance is silly.

Filed Under: ai, ai translations, preservation, translations, video games