The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.
“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site.
But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”
AI-powered video game decomps and recomps (recompiling code after modifying it) are everywhere. People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on, or to combine various games in any permutations you could possibly imagine. In recent days, tools specifically designed to decomp games with AI have popped up, such as “decomp.wtf,” which promises to “point the AI agent you already use at a game you own. decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original.”
Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.
Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”
“Coring out the brain of humanity” is a phrase that comes to my mind more often these days.
I think the AI luddites are playing into the hands of the wealthy, if they aren’t actually secret allies.
The problems with AI boil down to individuals having too much personal influence over humanity, no different from personal ownership of factories, banks, politicians, PMCs, and churches.
Everyone telling me and other weak individuals to not use local AI, are basically trying to strangle a new form of democracy in the cradle.
People don’t use AI as a tool which is the problem. They just ask it to do a job and don’t analyze or do anything with the results. It’s made people lazier about research. I’m not trusting what a machine decided should be there.
I once use AI to build a resume for me based off the one I already had and it just made shit up.
Yeah, more people need to be taught that generative AI models are literally auto-correct like on their phones. It is the gigantic, multi-trillion-dollar, ultra high tech, ultra high powered version of auto correct, but that’s what it is. Would they trust something important that, sight unseen?
For those of us who write code, it can be handy to have an auto correct that can suggest chunks of code rather than just the next word or filling in a partially typed variable name. But you have to treat it like a suggestion, and read the suggestion, and make a conscious decision about whether that is how you want it. Giving up your agency is bad, but that is what a huge portion of the population seems to want to do at every turn. Not having to do anything is a nice-sounding option to have, but it’s not good for your brain or body.
But on top of that, as an engineer, you are also losing out on familiarity with the design when you give up that agency. I find that when I let the neural net in my head – the one made out of actual neurons – get more exposure to the internal workings of a system, it is better at helping me diagnose problems with our product more quickly and intuitively.
and don’t analyze
see: “decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original”
when the C code creates byte-wise identical output, then there is not much need to analyse. The code is already as good as it gets, or at least there is not much room for improvement.
or do anything with the results.
see: “People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on”
This seems kind of sad.
It is sad! I’ve always loved being part of small communities and to see one get destroyed like this and so quickly is really sad.
If anyone is looking for alternatives that are useful it looks like recomp.fyi is doing a good job.
AI is gonna destroy capitalism and non-capitalism alike. It is agnostic to political alignment.
AI doesn’t build and maintain itself. Unless that changes, which I currently see no clear line of sight to, then it is just another asset primarily controlled and directed by rich people. Tools like that are always political.
deleted by creator
Open weight models can be run by anyone with the hardware, and many models can run on residential hardware. Rich people sure think they are going to control it, but it’s not clear that’s going to be the outcome.
yes but it can be used by both sides to this end even though most people see it like a pathway to next stage of capitalism, it can also be the quite opposite
I don’t disagree with the logic of what you’re saying but the likelihood of it actually happening that way seems low given historical trends. There are lots of examples of things that could or should have helped working people live better lives but ended up primarily making rich people richer. I don’t think AI is different in that respect.
Iirc three AI devs announced a worm that both builds and maintains itself.
Define “too easy” because the last AI decomp I saw was a 600ish megabyte Pokémon game for the DS that cost the guy $56k worth of tokens and was ultimately pointless because the actual source code had leaked ages ago.
For that price, I could create my own GPU farm of local models, instead of wasting money on tokens.
Saw someone about a decomp that after $250k was only 80% accurate.
That said, it is a use case that AI should be viable for: a known source of truth that can be used to verify a guess and drive retries. It needs a lot of tries, hence token costs, but it should, given enough retries, be able to let much “get it”.
Yeah but is there really any value in something like that? Maybe for corporate espionage, I guess, but that 250k is still heavily subsidized; these AI companies are hemorrhaging money. What happens when the capex fountain runs dry; is anyone going to pay a million dollars in tokens to get an 80% accurate decomp of an old pokemon game?
Oh I think it is shit, especially reading that 250k and the result was still 20% off of target in a scenario that should, in theory, be right in GenAI’s wheelhouse.
Btw the decomp I was referencing was of the original modern warfare 2 from 2009.
Btw the decomp I was referencing was of the original modern warfare 2 from 2009.
lol, amazing. This is what we get out of these datacenters burning tons of diesel. Everything is just so stupid.
First of all, lol.
Second of all, decompiling a binary in a clean room setting is not pointless just because leaked source code exists, because the decompilation can legally be used to make projects based on it whereas the leaked source code cannot be touched without facing the wrath of Nintendo lawyers.
Now, using AI to decompile a binary will likely not produce human-readable code, and will ultimately be pointless for things like studying code, producing high quality ports and mods, etc., but if a human or a group of humans did it, it can be extremely useful.
I doubt legality is a shield against them suing you and honestly I’m not entirely sure they’d lose; many judges aren’t technically literate enough to understand the difference between leaked source and decompiled. Better hope the lawyers you can afford are better than the ones they can.
I would be surprised if there is any case where direct use of decompiled code was ruled as “clean room” and transformative. People keep using that phrase without really understanding it.
Think the people assuming that clean room principles apply to this scenario are way too optimistic about the legality.
The most prominent clean room example was making a knockoff of the IBM BIOS. The thing is it was cloning a programming interface surface, and doing so with zero visibility into the object code, but instead an api reference written by people who did study the object code. Wine is even more clean room, guessing at a viable implementation based on black box observation of Windows behavior with zero understanding of the object code.
Translating object code into source code is not “clean room”. But even if it were, we are talking about a deep clone down to the implementation and up through the human presentation. Not merely some programming interface details with a completely novel backend and with other code mostly owning the presentation to a human.
People keep thinking they find a technical loophole but consistently get shot down the millisecond a rights holder takes note.
See the myriad of fan projects that don’t even try to clone a game engine but implement a game a new way, they get shut down hard.
cost the guy $56k worth of tokens
Could this be the future of decompiling other Pokémon games and even more complex titles?
Lmao pray whatever god you have that they won’t remove or hike the subscription plan then.
Define “too easy”
…they go into detail in the article.
It doesn’t say how much these decamps cost, or what quality they are. I don’t think burning a years salary on this is “easy”.
I don’t think burning a years salary on this is “easy”.
Burning money is actually quite easy.
Building a Lamborghini is easy, just go to the dealership and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Building a Lamborghini is not equivalent to spending money.
Wasting the money on a Lamborghini is easy.
Paying an AI for a decompilation is not the same as doing the decompilation. You’re buying the decompilation; that doesn’t mean the act itself was easy to accomplish.
Hey, now we’re saying the same thing :)
It’s easy to spend the money on AI doing the decompilation. It’s not easy to do the decompilation itself.
The fucking AI decomps SUCK too. I can’t be the only who who’s noticed. Bugs, performance issues, missing features, etc. Sure, technically they work, but it’s not a great experience. Every time I see a new decomp posted my very first question is “was it done with AI?”, Because if it was, I probably won’t bother with it.
You might be conflating decomps with ports that use decomps as a base.
A decompilation means taking a binary and reverse engineering source code that, when compiled, will produce an identical binary targeting the same platform.
AI has also been ruining decomps, making it a race and a numbers game, rather than focusing on quality and the production of human-readable code and the long-term documentation of how a game functions for long term preservation.
technically they work
turns out “technically correct” is the worst kind of correct
AI is great about putting out something like a human half assing whatever it is doing. Looks ok at a glance but there are problems when you look into the details.
I’m so fucking sick of AI slop.
I’ve been enjoying “using AI is like using a hammer to put screws it a board. It looks fine and holds together for a bit, but the littlest bit of pressure or shaking and it starts to fall apart.”
Reminds me of keto recipes for non keto foods. Looks mostly like the thing. Hardly tastes like it.
That’s because it’s just gonna be the same level as the average coder, and the average coder is a lazy pos.
Heyyyyy! I am not laz…ahh, he’s right. Who am I kidding. I’m lazy af.
Yes, working with some “Enterprise” software development teams in my career…
Their codebases were nightmares of people trying shit without actually understanding until the tests seemingly passed.
So no surprise that same crowd is having a pretty decent experience for them with AI: it codes almost as shitty as they did, in the same way.
Hey!
I’m also fat. A fat, lazy pos.
Let’s see the AI do that! Ha!
Have you seen their RAM requirements? The AI is very fat indeed.
Please don’t take this as a defence of AI, but I saw this with human-led decomp projects too.
I was pretty active in the Pokemon hacking scene a few years back, and I happen to have a friend who has made a very popular rom hack (not giving names, but if you are interested in those kind of things, you probably played his game), and he told me that he tried to switch from binary hacking to decomp, but the decomp had so many insidious bugs, especially in the battle system, that he much rather keep making hacks with HMA (the currently popular universal hacking tool) rather than deal with that can of worms.
I also happen to be a huge Ace Combat fan, and the recomp project of AC6 is miles better than what the emulator offered just a year ago. If it wasn’t for AI, I would still be forced to use my OG X360 to have anything resembling a good experience on that game. The AI-led recomp is just as good as the game on original hardware, and gives me the chance to play the since-delisted DLCs too.
I don’t think this is as black and white as saying “human-made good, AI-made bad”. It’s a matter of how much care the person behind the decomp/recomp puts into it, AI or not.
Which sucks, because I think the best aspect of these projects was the community that would develop around them, the treasure trove of knowledge that someone would gather by working on them, and, as dumb as it sounds, the friends you made along the way. Some of my best friends, I got to know through the Pokemon hacking scene, and it wouldn’t have happened if everything was a matter of writing a bunch of prompts on an LLM. The fact that AI made them so easy, and that they are completely indistinguishable from human-led projects (aside from looking at the publication date) is sad. I think that’s the worst part of this situation.
If your friend made or helped to make Pokemon Unbound, I appreciate them
That’s a shame because if AI was used as a tool, it would still have the community helping to make the ports functional.
Hand created ports also had performance issues, missing features, etc that took years for the community to fix.
It seems like it’s a problem of over hyping the results like what has happened with AI everywhere.
I don’t think it’s a problem with overhyping the results. It’s the fact that you can get something with essentially no work. If the LLM just didn’t output anything at all but told you with a voice prompt that couldn’t be transcribed to text you wouldn’t see anyone using it. It’s the fact that it allows people to be lazy and still get output, no matter how bad the output is as long as the thing runs, that is making these chatbots so popular.
Well the real problem is the signal to noise, the noise looking almost just right, and people over excited over the novelty of “I can help now!”, even if they really can’t.
If the thing runs right, then it would be less of a problem, but it almost runs right.
Couldn’t this be mitigated by better attention on the part of the human operator? Like, use the ai to crack it open, then actually go back through and verify that everything actually works?
That requires the person to know what they’re doing, and using the AI as the tool it is. That’s a proper use of generative AI in coding, to speed up a human-driven process with oversight.
That’s not what AI slop is, AI slop is what vibe coders do. They don’t know how any of the shit actually works, they just tell the AI to do something, and modify prompting until it gives them something that works. They can’t fix the issues because they don’t know what was done in the first place.
The problem is that both use types look identical to anyone not directly involved in the project. Things like Claude don’t tell you whether it was used by a vibe coder or a responsible developer, it looks exactly the same.
Sight amendment, they prompt until it gives them something that looks like it works, based on their often incomplete understanding of the target use case and likely laziness to explore all the nuance of the result.
Like people who were heavy users of Photoshop that tried the vibed knockoff lamented that it failed at all but the most basic image editing tasks. The vibe coder likely never used Photoshop for anything more than casual use, so they couldn’t have vetted the result properly even if they were inclined to.
It’s a shame that it’s leading to the close of a community that could have actually put together a better system for adapting to this. That sense of community that died to this would have been a great way to team up and vet each others work. Even vibe coders could have had a part, they may not have the skill to actually program things but they clearly have the time and interest.
Problem is just the sheer volume of shit to vet. Vibe coders get a bit pissy when folks seemingly can’t “keep up” with their volume of shit and just keep shitting more and making an unmanageable backlog. They figure if the AI in their unskilled hands can get it over 80% there, then surely a skilled person can somehow use AI to knock out that last bit fast.
Issue being that however far the vibe coder got, the skilled people they look to finish it off could have just gotten it that far themselves just as quickly. It’s like someone sending a search to Google on someone’s behalf and pastes the result and thinking that was somehow way easier than the person just searching Google themselves.
Is it better than nothing, because that’s mostly what we had before. Decomp used to take years for one N64 game. Bugs can be ironed out.
It’s actually a lot tougher to iron out bugs that GenAI can’t sort out for itself than I usually see with human code. Trying to fix a bug the vibe coder couldn’t get the AI to squash is always a maddening nightmare…
Recomps didn’t require AI, and those didn’t take years to complete.
They can’t of the trend pushes those with the knowledge how out of the scene like is clearly happening.
They don’t think it be like it is, but it do
Edit:
Okay so I went back and I figure you meant
This kind of trend pushes those with the know how out of the scene like what is clearly happening.
I’d say there’s probably a bigger opportunity for those with the know how to leverage it. People that were in for the insane puzzle level that is decompiling from what I understand can still do it.
I think either people are in it for the fun, or for opening up games. If a tool coming out and making it much easier is what gets you to quit, then you were in it for the wrong reasons.
Sounds like some flavor of gatekeeping. "Well if everyone else can do it, I quit :( ". Meh.
People can be quitting for “bad” reasons, but assuming they all are is unfair and unhelpful. That large groups and projects are shuttering over these changes should be met with more than “they’re just overacting”. Even if they are, the long term damage is real and should be concerning.
It’s a massive trend right now and everyone is trying to vibecode their own decomps/ports, often people who have no idea what they’re doing.
There are plenty of AI-assisted ones that are actually good, but they’re hard to find amidst the untested slop. It doesn’t help that a lot of these self-proclaimed “native PC ports” just turn out to be an emulator packaged with the game.
Wow I kind of expected a better headline from 404. The website makes it clear that it’s not about being easy, it’s about it being low effort and antisocial.
You don’t think low-effort and easy can be the same?
Easy is answering the question “what is 2 + 2?”
Low effort is using a calculator for the answer.
The tone carries clearly different connotations, one way makes it sound more positive and the other makes it sound more negative. Tone is very important in a headline.
In some cases, but the text of the article implies that a big issue with the AI decomps is that they’re low quality, so it’s not really making it easier to do the actual work involved so much as it’s automating low effort slop
Yeah, a big issue more broadly. Congratulations, it technically achieved a very narrow requirement, but unlike what we are used to, the result is difficult to take forward, neither human nor GenAI are able to reasonably modify the result in precise ways.
Decomp.wtf which was referenced as one of the tools has been archived today, because it’s author realised it’s killing the community. Cats out of the bag now, so not sure how that will help.
???
I can understand decomp.dev shutting down because it was mainly a tool to motivate the community, but decomp.wtf shutting down sounds silly. I find it hard to believe that someone made a tool for AI agents and then say “I didn’t realize some people don’t like AI”. Why would he even make it if he’s going to shut it down in a few days and be upset that people were using it? The original description straight up told people to use it to finish other people’s public decomps, so it’s not like he was considerate and careful about how the project was used until now.
I’ve seen lots of deeply AI fanatic behavior where they are entirely oblivious to how obnoxious other people are finding their output.
This case seems like they did some reflection and internalized the situation, which is nice to see. Most decent folks step back when they realize they are actively shitting on the work of people they respect. Hence AI slop being relatively more popular among sociopathic folks.
Note there is a reasonable difference between AI use and slop, but the “lazy didn’t give a shit” nature of AI slopists means they can produce way more volume than the more quality users.
https://decomp.wtf/ site has their statement, GitHub is archived.
Will see if it’s still dead at the end of the week I guess.
The loss of skills as this continues to happen is going to be devastating. At least as people moved from machine level coding to higher compilers there were still programming methodology and awareness of how and why things work. One problem with AI in anything is that it’s difficult to keep it focused on just one thing, it likes to wander and do other changes too, which for coding will end up changing and breaking stuff and the human has no idea why since it wasn’t even assigned.
We’ve lived for a while in a consume and trash society where the ability to fix things yourself is gone, and now it’s in coding.
Where do you get the wandering AI idea from?
The worst I get when I tell pretty much any hosted/service frontier model to do a specific focused task is “I also noticed [potential bug/issue/code smell], if you would like me to do anything about it, just say the word”.
My own experience and understanding that if allowed, it will recreate existing code that is working with something a bit different, that may still work. It’s the code version of the image generation where it narrows in on one aspect of the picture to your specifics, but something in the background is altered slightly. And yes, image generation is a different type of model, and inpainting can avoid this, AND minimizing letting the context window get too large, but that’s just it. If given freedom, it will drift over time. In the end it’s probabilistic math, and without heavy guardrails things change.
If the human is in control, aware of what’s being done, and the AI is used as a tool to help the human and not a black box to get a result without intervention, then a lot of this is avoided. Is it being used like this? Some places. Most places, no.
What the fuck are you on about? You’re talking about abstract nonsense.
Coding AI doesn’t “recreate existing code that is working with something a bit different”.
If I have, say, a website or an app, and I tell the AI that on this and this page/screen there’s a green button, and I want that to turn blue, it goes in, finds the button (either via code analysis or via an emulator/browser + visual identification), finds its style, and changes the colour.
If I tell it to figure out what the very same button does, it does the same flow, except it goes further by tracing that button’s click event, and then all the logic that is bound to it, even through multiple layers (e.g. in a well designed app that click event is handled in the ViewModel of the specific screen, which in turn calls a Use case, which in turn incorporates business logic and calls Repositories, which in turn call the data storage or networking layers, or maybe even both…), then explains what happens.
But let me give you a real world example. Just the other day I was working on a tool, a web flasher for a handful of different ESL (Electronic Shelf Label, e-ink based price tags). It involves connecting to a USB probe, plugging the probe into the board via spring contacts, and then running specific code to install custom software on the device so it talks to my smarthome. Most of the work was lift and shift - the flashing logic existed as C/Python code, so it was quickly ported to JavaScript, utilising WebUSB.
But it was ugly. The only thing I told the damn thing was to “make it look good”. You know what the AI did?
It went onto the official site of the project, grabbed the fonts, colours, sizes, etc., and put that style on the flasher page. The only “went out of its way” thing it added was a “virtual e-ink display” emulating a tag, that was actually on the project site (https://openepaperlink.de/). It didn’t go around changing the flashing code, the device detection, etc., it just covered the changes I requested - which were pretty broad.
What AI does depends 100% on the prompt. Image editing is a bit finicky because most image editing models come with their own LLM beyond the visual engine itself, and that LLM tends to be super limited, without any thinking loop, so it does what it first recognises (and often doesn’t recognise negation - e.g. telling it to NOT change something, will result in specifically that change, because, again, the LLM included is tiny and crappy).
But you can’t compare a “hey I asked AI to do X to my image and it did twelve other things” to working with codegen AI - especially the reinforced loop models like Claude or Codex that literally goes on to work out any issues by expanding on its own task while the goal remains what you set it to. So if you tell it to design a fancy website for you, you get a fancy website - but e.g. it won’t start working on creating an investment portfolio or do sports bets for you.
My own experiences with various projects aren’t abstract nonsense. You said yourself the prompt matters, and a broad prompting over time on the same project does drift. You haven’t seen it, then good. I can’t speculate on why. I’'m not even saying it always happened, only that because of how these things work, probability does come into play.
The last is a strawman, I was using image generation as an example of visual drift that’s more obvious that code. Nor did I imply drift as in a totally different direction - as I stated, the new routines would still work sometimes, but would differ in their approaches or use different variable names. Not all drift is critical or breaks things, but it’s there. It’s not an abstract.
Eh, I’m really not worried. The decomps are interesting as a proof of concept, but they really really aren’t very good, and once the VC funding runs out and the vibe coders have to invest actual money, you’ll see a big decrease in these decomps and vibe coded apps. The world of foss will largely return to the hands of the people who actually care about the quality of their code.
I agree that there will (probably) always be some amount of people that have passion enough to do these things themselves, but this is still a big problem as it erodes current infrastructure for the transfer of knowledge. The state of these scenes by the time the bubble finally bursts will likely be vastly diminished and in little state to help the new or tenacious people that are left.
So I don’t disagree, but at the same time I also don’t see many people relying on these vibe-coded apps, or including them in crucial points within software stacks. For example if a vibe-coded Mario Kart decomp project gets orphaned it doesn’t really have widespread repercussions.
I will say that a whole upcoming generation is pretty much noping away from entering this industry. Can’t blame them, as at least for a large chunk of their early earning years, companies will not be hiring them.
Is that just a feeling? Because my feeling is that the foss movement is entering a golden age even when you take into consideration all of the slop coding getting posted
Based on the high schoolers my kids associate with and how they have broadly ditched the idea of software development as a viable career to try for.
Also our internship program dropped like 90% in applicants this year compared to last. Most years we do interviews to pick the ones that get slots, this time we just took them all and many groups just didn’t get their interns.
I think to the extent AI works, it strongly steers people away from foss collaboration. Why collaborate if the AI can just generate a bespoke solution? If the AI output doesn’t work, then other people aren’t going to be excited to try to help you make it work among a sea of other broken code.
Maybe post bubble pop. If AI falls to work as well as hoped, a move back to the former status quo. If it does work out well enough, maybe sofware developer goes from six figure to a boring middle class job that doesn’t attract so many comers.
Oh sorry, sure yeah I wasn’t talking about careers. I was only speaking of volunteers specifically. Claude is cheap right now but when it becomes full price I don’t think most people doing video game decomps will want to pay for it.
We’re commenting under an article that’s directly reporting on the widespread repercussions we’re facing.
Sure yeah I guess if you want to consider a single video game community shutting down to be “widespread repercussions” you certainly have that right, but I don’t think we’ll be able to find common ground on this topic. Have a good one!
Sure yeah I guess if you want to consider a single video game community shutting down to be “widespread repercussions”
Yeah, I do. That you don’t shows your point of view is too narrow to properly consider the implications.
And “we” didn’t do anything. You’re the one bailing after the slightest bit of push back with your snide comment. If you want to disengage, that’s you’re prerogative, but pretending to be civil and magnanimous when you’re really just being dismissive of other viewpoints is underhanded.
Consider this, though;
Corporations will now be forced to reckon with the fact that IP is meaningless thanks to their new toys. Anything extant is fair game for AI? Buckle the fuck up, then, 'cause that’s a very nice everything you have there, and it’d be a shame of somebody AI’d it. Which they will. And it’ll either be crowd-sourced like these game de-re-comps, or it’ll be the unofficial “rogue agent” breaking all your shit wide open because you also have your own “rogue agents” talking to theirs.
Legislation will happen sooner this way, and while the damage will undoubtedly have been done to your average creative intellectual in the short term, at least creative intellectuals are capable of adapting to the new. The shackles that will rightfully-but-belatedly be placed on AI once this comes to a head will genuinely cripple many of these companies who went literally ALL FUCKING IN on AI.
It may yet still be too little too late in terms of a great many things we have so long taken for granted, but take a look at the PS5 leak and Sony’s take on ownership alongside all this and tell me that isn’t the most hilariously ironic thing that could happen to them.
All this shit is about to come right back around, and they’ve all talked themselves into a corner that this is for the good of everyone that it works like it does. Bet, bitches, here comes the slop that is on the surface totally indistinguishable from your actual product that is also now inextricably linked to your brand. Y’all are fucked and have nobody to blame but yourselves.
Note this theory of “if AI can clone/decompile, then it is fair game” is a pretty baseless “legal theory”. People are stitching together incomplete understandings of cases. It is kind of like all those “sovereign citizen” legal theories where people think they have the magical legal recipe only to get slapped hard when they have to try to reconcile that with a real court.
While this is a perfectly valid point you make, all these companies have spent the past couple years arguing that all this is fair game as long as AI does it.
“Rogue agents?” Do you really believe that? Which reminds me, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn if so. Act fast I’ll even throw in the one next to it for half off.
There are currently no laws that apply to this BS directly and that is precisely the problem that we have all had with AI bros for so long, and it is the problem they are about to run smack into, but not before their own toys cannibalize everything they’ve built into a zombified approximation of itself with bits of other ideas grafted on the side like some Lovecraftian nightmare program. And it’ll be just as maddeningly incomprehensible and their ultimate ruin the moment they behold it for what it truly is.
Again, that doesn’t mean regular folks won’t be caught up in the cascade effects all this will cause, but when the laws go up to rein the bullshit in - and one way or another they surely will - it isn’t going to have to be you and me who figure out how to work without AI. Like I said, these companies are talking themselves blue in the face that IP doesn’t apply to AI. And now its coming back to bite them.
This is only going to cascade. And when the real court does get involved, the AI bros’ own legal arguments will work against them in so many cases for talking out both sides of their mouth all the damn time.
I’m not playing with AI and have gone out of my way to avoid updating my tech with anything AI these days. Linus has made that an exercise in futility given my current OS, but I am nobody and trust that my standard security measures - which are definitely above the average Mac/windows user - will continue to keep me safe from the average threat I am more than likely to face.
I think your sovereign citizen comparison was apt, but even in the name of corporate interests, I don’t see it going against precedent when push actually comes to shove; these stupid bastards wouldn’t stand for anybody else’s hands on their pie and that’s what they’ve inadvertently been arguing for with how things are developing.
What they have so far argued is that it isn’t infringement until an operator asks for output that infringes, and then it is the operators fault. I hate that argument, but so far they sidestep the dicey issue by putting the burden on the operator.
The rogue agent thing is bullshit, but we have shitty criminal enforcement and complicit would-be plaintiffs rather than a lack of law.
They did for example rule against that one company ripping off anothers legal material despite the “but AI” defense. The court didn’t care one way or the other about the process, they just cared that the output was obviously infringement. AI or no AI.
I could definitely imagine something like GTA6 getting cracked and then half-assedly ported to PS3 by AI. Let the greed and hubris of all the companies who thought they could fire all their talent and corner the market on slopbased IP rehashes for infinite profit at minimal cost fire back on them.
Is there anywhere to follow these types of things? I’ve been seeing it all lately from third hand sources
Yeah I was surprised to hear about how big the AI decomp wave was from my friends, because there was absolutely no buzz about it on lemmy.
Makes me wonder how many other things I miss because of using Lemmy instead of Reddit…
Honestly, what would be nice is for a community like this to serve as gatekeeper with high standards for decomp projects to meet. Sure 99% won’t make it in but who cares?
I know we’re in the Wild West days right now but eventually things will settle. If the foss community can find a way to make torrents organized safe and accessible they can do anything.
This feels like an asshole move. Instead of providing a central location for tracking, encouraging open sourcing and continued development the dude just threw his hands up in the air and said “I give up”.
Like yeah, the AI usage sucks and those versions are buggy as hell but at least it’s a start for some games and people can continue the work to improve it.
But now without easy tracking every script kiddy and vibecoder are just going to assume they are the first and make another project somewhere then repeat the same work that has already been done.
I get that life happens or people move on from a project but damn dude, let someone else takeover or GTFO of the way.
To be fair, the slop users are relentless. Trying to even decide when to say yes to becomes a maddening chore if your community is popular and attract tons of random people excited about the novelty of being able to “contribute”.
As in other cases, AI is at its worst when you have to deal with other people’s output. So closed source can have a reasonably happy time because everyone that isn’t on the same page is within slapping distance. But open communities and projects… Oof…
I get your point, and since this project has only been up for two years it’s not too much history being lost.
However, I also empathize with the perspective of the site maintainer as well. There’s a lot more chaff to be separated from the wheat with the deluge of vibecoded submissions. I think keeping a frozen record of the site might be best to provide a point-in-time snapshot of where human-based progress of decompilation has gotten to. Someone else can manage the sifting through the AI slop, because that’s not what the maintainer signed up for.
It may feel that way, but it’s not an asshole move. We are all struggling with mental health and existential dread in the face of what sometimes seems to be a genuine polycrisis that includes an AI apocalypse. Some people deal with this stress more effectively than others, but it doesn’t make someone an asshole when they just can’t take it anymore and you’ve gotta expect some people are going to crash out pretty hard. This is a lot milder than how some people are going to inevitably crash out, and this is not going to be the only situation like this.
The asshole part is not letting others fork it or open sourcing it. Like I said, I get that life happens but the dude is literally blocking progress.
Maybe they have reasons, maybe they’re good reasons, maybe they’re not. It doesn’t matter, because we aren’t entitled to know why they don’t want to release the code, and we aren’t entitled to the code either. Nobody should be obligated to open source their code (unless money has changed hands). It’s not exactly proprietary cutting edge research that will take decades to rediscover and reimplement.
I’m sorry, but I hate how people think free services that never promised to be open source, don’t ask anything of you, don’t take advantage of you, and don’t sell your data, somehow because they got popular because of that, makes them owe the community even more than anyone would ever believe that exploitive freemium or even paid, commercial software does. Nobody’s pretending that Adobe owes us the source code because millions of people paid for Photoshop. We all acknowledge they’re an asshole, but we know we’re not getting the source code and many people still pay for it.
So why does a free website owe its community even more than that? Like the fact that they were kind and generous to the community for a few years means they are now obligated to be a complete doormat and give you everything you want from them upon request or be called an asshole? They don’t get any personal rights and if they try to have any, they’re an asshole, but commercial software does it all the time and it’s okay because it’s just expected that commercial software is going to be an asshole? WTF? We just call anybody who doesn’t give us their source code upon request an asshole? Shut down the whole internet and from now on only provide services that are completely open source from day 1? Sure, sounds great. Anyone who’s got code you like and is just trying to survive this capitalist dystopia without releasing all their source code for free is an asshole, fuck them. Got it.
They do it for free, if they decided to just take the thing down at least respect that. If people want to have a similar stuff they can just, idk, vibecode it since it’s the in thing today.
Like yeah, the AI usage sucks and those versions are buggy as hell but at least it’s a start for some games and people can continue the work to improve it.
They can’t keep up with it though, they said it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects because of the use of AI in the community. It’s simply not viable to continue the community the way it was intended and I can’t blame them for not wanting to put more work toward something they don’t support any longer.
But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”
