As AI has become more capable and popular as a coding tool over the years, I've started to see more ports of games to various platforms, such as "DELTARUNE for PS Vita" or the "Animal Crossing PC Port", both of which contain disclaimers that AI was used in some capacity.

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How vague...

AI is one of those things that I don't have a concrete opinion on (maybe eventually I'll write a full opinion piece on it), but honestly these ports piss me off for a few reasons.

In a very broad and laymen way, let's separate AI usage into two categories: "the means to an end" and "the end product".

By "the means to an end", I mean "what do I lose from getting help from an AI", or in a lot of cases, "what do I lose from just having the AI do the work for me".

And "the end product" meaning "is what I get in the end worth using AI as a means to reach".

Now, you could argue that in both of these cases, AI isn't worth using at all for a variety of reasons, but that's outside the scope of my argument at the moment.

If, for example, I wanted to do something simple on my computer or homelab that required me to write a script or something, I could use AI to save time and write the script for me so that I can just have the functionality I need and be done with it.

You don't learn anything much from doing this, so the "means to an end" factor would be low, but "the end product" factor would be higher since depending on the complexity of what you want to do and its usefulness, you could argue that it would be better to save time by having the AI do it so you could just have that script faster.

Some people also use AI as a learning tool, having it teach them things. I would say the "means to an end" factor here is higher because you do gain something, which is knowledge. "The end product" factor could be high too if you used that knowledge towards something good or useful.

In the case of projects like these, both of these factors are low.

These projects don't fully disclose HOW they use AI, so for all we know, they could be vibe-coding the entire project, so I would say the "means to an end" factor here is pretty low since you don't really gain from having the AI do the porting work instead of doing it yourself.

"The end product" factor here is also low because, well, this is a hobby project! There is no genuinely practical reason to have an Animal Crossing PC port or a port of Deltarune for the PS Vita. You should be doing this because you have a passion for this sort of thing, there's no passion in using AI to have these games on these platforms. No one is ACTUALLY going to play Deltarune on Vita for a genuine reason other than that "it's cool". Nothing cool with being lazy about it.

And once you bring the actual ethics of AI into the equation, it makes these projects even more insulting. Knowing how many resources AI actually uses, how much stolen data was used to train these AI, and many more factors, and it's being used so you can have bragging rights for making a port no one is actually going to play for more than 5 minutes just to test it and say "hm, cool", and then move on with their lives.

I got a little heated towards the end there, and you know what, I am a bit of a hypocrite. I have used AI in the past for doing smaller tasks, and I do use AI for the sake of convenience. More recently, I've been using Godot with C# and I've been using AI as a source of documentation since I'm not too fond of the official documentation for figuring out how to do certain things. Hell, many parts of this website are vibe-coded because I couldn't figure out how to use Hugo the way I wanted to.

I could make arguments to why I used AI in these cases, but writing this, along with the massive amount of AI discussion I've seen online has made me reflect on my stance on AI, and how I should be using it, or even if I should. Truthfully, as I said in the beginning, I don't have a grounded stance on AI, but I do want to make a post further reflecting on AI eventually.

However, I just wanted to talk about this specific usage of AI today since it just felt really lazy and pointless to me.