The whole point of HG is to be as open as possible, letting freelancers piggyback on (and, when they’re successful, enlarge) the audience CoG has built around its coding language.
Unlike the CoG brand, HG is meant to be seen as a platform, not a publisher. CoG doesn’t do quality assurance for HGs beyond the basics that a similar platform like itch.io or Steam might. They’ve tried to keep barriers to entry as low as possible, rather than making judgment calls on which HG games are likely to succeed (like they do with CoG games).
There’s no shortage of fans who’ll say that the lack of editorial interference has made HG overall a stronger brand, with more labor-of-love authors willing and able to do distinctive things with the medium. There’s also little question that the least popular games written in Choicescript are also HG, due to the lack of a quality floor (beyond the very low one that the beta test requirement is meant to establish).
CoG is a small business, trying to square its goal of giving freelance game writers an opportunity to be published with its limited capacity to screen and edit all the games people submit to it. To date, the very light-footprint editorial approach to HG has been core to that balance. The need to screen out AI material might be the thing that pushes the company in a new direction; but I would expect that to reduce the number of HGs published per year, not because lots are caught with AI material, but because of the additional strain on CoG/HG employee hours.
We’ll see what they decide. But regardless, “think long and hard before future purchases” is the right approach for any of these games, doubly so for HGs…and the chance to play the first chapter without a purchase makes it relatively easy to screen out the ones that don’t meet your basic quality expectations.