I do not like Generative AI. The ChatGPTs, Geminis, and Claudes of the world are the worst thing that happened in the tech industry, giving us terrible advertisements, people’s skills atrophying, and several lawsuits because of people taking their own lives through these chatbots. If you’re gonna give any arguments in defense of this kind of stuff, please keep them to yourself. I am not interested. There can be merits for some parts of AI, but the stuff that keeps getting peddled by Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic? Garbage.
What gets me the absolute most lately is not the AI-generated art just plastered everywhere, something I’ve seen as far back as 2025’s Portland Retro Gaming Expo. No, it’s a trend that’s been happening a lot in 2026 and I hate it.
On May 22, 2025, Anthropic introduced Claude Code to the public, starting with Claude 4.0. A subset of their Claude AI bot that’s made for handling programming tasks, it started blowing up throughout the year, with folks praising Claude for letting them do their automated tasks and vibe code their way through projects. (Never mind such things existed before Claude, but I digress.)
Naturally, the video game space would get caught up in Claude fever, as we’d start seeing a few translations come from random folks who never dealt with such projects before. The biggest was back in February, when someone announced an English translation of the Japanese game SEGAGAGA, a Sega Dreamcast game that was a self-parody of Sega around this time. This game was notorious because of the large amount of content that would require translation and proper localization. People rejoiced, as such a project is a huge undertaking and felt like one of the holy grails, one of those that would never come to fruition.
Until it was immediately noticed they used AI to translate it. The results were very clear online, with the typical cheap Japanese-to-English translation that sounds wonky. Hell, I bet there’s at least one (1) “It Can’t Be Helped” in there, a common thing that machine translating Japanese to English does. Funny, I remember the days when folks would actually be shunned for just lazily using Google Translate to translate a Japanese script.
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