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.
“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.”