The past four weeks have been something of a wake-up call for the video game industry. You’ve read the headlines, so you know the deal by now: AI advancements spearheaded by Claude Opus 5.5 have turned the world of coding on its axis. Decompilations that used to take months, or even years, are now being pumped out on a daily basis, and publishers can’t keep up with the deluge of vibe-coded browser ports and “native” PC recompilations.
I’ve been covering and researching this over the past month, and there’s one recurring topic that keeps popping up in every comment section I read: karma. For many, this is the video game industry’s “you reap what you sow” moment, proof that the AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword.
I mean, you have to nail down the definition of think.
Neural networks are attempts at programmatically mimicking the way the brain works. Because of how computers work, it obviously can’t work exactly the same as the brain does.
The fact that they hallucinate and get stuff wrong isn’t evidence that thinking isn’t happening; people are confidently incorrect all the time.
It takes an input, processes it using the data generated by its training, and provides a unique response. That sounds like thinking to me.
But the technology is still basically in its alpha phase, and unfortunately idiot tech execs are selling it as a finished product.
As I understand it, neural networks better at mimicking the way the brain dreams. It’s mindless pattern recognition.
That’s why it hallucinates - it doesn’t have the rational part of thinking that can tell false patterns from reality.