Today saw the release of s&box, the long-in-development successor to Garry’s mod that’s also open source and hopes to become a kind of Roblox for dads. There’s no denying the potential of this toolkit, nor the commendably generous principles behind why it’s been released in the way it has, but it does have one immediate issue. And it’s 2026, so of course that issue is AI-generated slop.
S&box’s Steam reviews are, at the time of writing, decidedly “mixed”, with the vast majority of negative reviews referencing AI in some respect. I’ve just downloaded the game-slash-platform to have a look and, on the landing page where you can view what’s on offer, a lot of the games being offered do look like they’ve been tossed together quickly using such tools, and have the negative ratings to match. I also don’t think I’ve ever come across a more intriguing game name, in both a good and bad way, than “Terry’s Granny (Now with Co-op!)”
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PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston sat down with Newman recently at GDC, and the issues of moderation and AI came up. Do bear in mind that Newman was talking shortly before s&box was released into the wild.
“You expect the community to flag it up, basically, with a lot of these systems that don’t exist yet, because we’re not released yet,” said Newman. “My general thing with moderation is you want something to moderate before you create a system to moderate it. So we want people to break the rules, and then we’ll notice, and then we’ll create a system, and you can apply that retroactively, and you can find the right system for it then: which might be AI, it might be manual review. There’s a lot of options nowadays.”
As for Facepunch’s general stance on AI, Newman said it’s a no-brainer that people are going to use it and praises the technology in some respects, while acknowledging the ‘slop’ problem.
“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,” said Newman. “I think programmers are over it now. They’ve seen how useful it is, how more efficient it makes them. My thoughts on AI with programming are basically the same as porn.”
Hold up, let him cook.
“So like if you use too much porn, you lose your ability to ejaculate using your imagination,” said Newman. “Yeah I think you need to kind of split it 50/50: you need to use your imagination sometimes to be able to do that. I think it’s the same with coding. If you count on AI to always do it, then you’re going to lose the ability to think critically and do [it yourself]. But 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 with on the web or search.”
As for whether Facepunch has a codified policy on AI, Newman said the studio uses it in “early pre-production stuff” but he’s sensitive as to why artists will feel very differently to coders about it.
“My policy on AI in s&box is I think eventually the slop will just fall to the bottom,” said Newman. “Nobody will be interested, because they’ll see [through it], but also it’s evolving that fast 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, for our artists it’s a really hot topic. And I can see the point when it’s been trained on their work.”
Newman says the use of AI at Facepunch on the artistic side is more of “a replacement for Google Images” than anything which will find its way into the final product, and sees s&box following a similar trajectory to gmod.
“In Garry’s Mod we didn’t approach it with a plan in mind to make it better, but we knew that while we were making it we’d naturally spot the mistakes that we made,” laughs Newman. “Well that I made in Garry’s mod, and fix them along the way. And that’s kind of what we’ve been doing [in s&box].”
S&box is available now on Steam.
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