"There Is A Reason They Are Banned" - The Amiga Community Turns Against AI-Generated Website 1
Image: Damien McFerran / Time Extension

Last week, we reported that the retro website Generation Amiga's GenAI practices had come under fire from the community, and we're now hearing that parts of the Amiga fandom are rejecting the site's content outright, leading to its ban from certain social media groups.

In a post on Facebook, Amiga fan Jack Ells posted the following:

"I follow AmigaGuru, ZZAP, IndieRetroNews and notible streamers like AmigaBill and Amiga Live. But visiting Generation Amiga today, I was shocked to see the entire site including the write ups are all done by AI. The thumbnails, and the AI headliners! I'm pretty sure the site owner uses chatGTP."

Neil Green, an admin on The Commodore Amiga - Games & Hardware Facebook group – which has over 30,000 followers – replied with this comment:

"Just chiming in here as that word crept up on my feed. This is one reason of many that Generation Amiga is banned in all of my groups. They don't just use AI for all of their news stories taking the piss with gaming developers, but this goes against what actual writers stand for. Furthermore in the past they falsified stories and used bots to spam groups. Awful site."

Green has gone one step further by posting the following statement on the The Commodore Amiga - Games & Hardware Facebook group:

"Just a warning and needs to be said. I've seen a number of developers posting Generation Amiga articles now but there is a reason they are banned here. Not only did they use bots in the past to post across Facebook, but they went from falsifying news stories ( according to EAB at the time ) but are an exclusively ONLY an AI website. AI images and AI write ups.

Unlike sites such as Amiga Guru, ZZAP, IndieRetroNews, AmigaFuture and AmigaAddict who do their own writing.

So yes, an extremely shady site and developers need to be aware of this, thinking they put a ton of effort in when it was all just prompted through chatGTP."

After our initial reporting last week, Generation Amiga posted a statement defending its use of AI, which I won't link to here for obvious reasons (ironically, the site owner has disabled 'copy > paste' for text). The owner is completely unrepentant about using AI to compete with human-made sites (like the one you're reading now) and seems to suggest that our wider reach and the fact that we're part of a multi-site network (built up over more than 20 years by real human writers) means it's unfair for us to criticise such practices.

However, the vitriolic reaction from the Amiga community proves that readers don't want AI-generated content.