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I got the rare chance this week to sit down with Garry's Mod creator and Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman, whose next project, game creation platform s&box, is preparing for launch in April.
"I don't mind AI that much, because it makes my job so much easier, but I know a lot of artists are more sensitive over AI," he said. "I think programmers are over it now. They've seen how useful it is, how more efficient it makes them."
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Then he said the sort of thing a headline writer dreams of.
"My thoughts on AI with programming are basically the same as porn," Newman said. "So, like, if you use too much porn, you lose your ability to ejaculate using your imagination."
Everyone at the table laughed, myself included—but doesn't he have a point?
"I think you need to kind of split it, 50/50. You need to use your imagination sometimes, to be able to do that. And I think it's the same with coding," he said. "If you count on AI to always do it, then you're going to lose the ability to think critically."
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Some early studies have backed this up: a 2025 MIT test of 54 adults showed that those who used ChatGPT while writing essays had lower brain activity and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."
At the same time, Newman finds AI pretty useful in his work. "I think I've learned more from AI than I've outsourced to it. It's taught me techniques and new things that are way better than anything I've ever come up [from searching] the web," he said.
"So the policy on AI [for user-made content] in s&box is, I think, eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom." he said. "Nobody will be interested, because they'll see it."
As for AI in general: "It's evolving that fast that we can't really ignore it, and we can't say 'Don't use AI' because we use AI in our coding all the time. It's useful, it's fast. But for art, it's kind of a hot topic," Newman said. "Our artists… it's a really hot topic for them. I can kind of see the point when it's been trained on their work."
Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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