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.
We’re going to find out that AI was trained on stolen source code and isn’t actually reverse engineering anything.
Good for them! Maybe, just maybe, this will bring some advancement to the subject.
Didn’t xbox start a division to do this?
can we just rescind their business licenses already?
This is PRO-AI shit.
So… this story actually gets funnier.
Yes that’s right, Teeny Weeny Tim Sweeny showed up in the replies to personally immediately destroy any potential good will this story could possibly have generated for him and Epic.
Keep swingin’ Tim.
One of these days, we’ll be able to get rid of the tee ball stand… one of these days…
These are great screenshots. Makes his posts super readable.
Hey if you wanna buy me a better phone or contribute to a physical therapy support fund for my shoulder that is recovering from being dislocated for 2 and half years of homelessness, lemme know and I’ll start a gofundme.
Teeny weeny whiney… Sp3ctr4l?
I like it! I rather not digest his stupidity at my full reading speed
Yeah, Tiny Tim tweets are classified as a cognitive hazard and thus protective measures need to be taken,
finally found the status/2114913470017860071
he is getting grilled by his hypocrisy- tomjank/status/2115200871701372971
there were more, but he’s deleting his responses live
There ya go!
Yeah I don’t actually use Twitter, because ick, but there are youtubers who wander those blasted and accursed wastes, in search of high grade slop, and occasionally they do find gold.
I’m not advocating for you to rip off the big corps.
‐wink- ‐wink-
Epic will simply pay Anthropic a “sabotage your LLM to refuse to undermine our products” fee and then they’ll pass the costs onto their users.
The only useful LLM (and I recognise that that word is doing a lot of heavy lifting) is one that you own and control. Everything else is just letting some techbro limit what you can do.
I am not sure that the market will bear them passing on those costs. They are already having trouble converting free users to paid tiers, and those paid tiers are not even profitable for them at this time.
Large language models are easily reproducible, that’s why they’re buying up all the computer parts to makesure you can’t afford run one on your own hardware. Luckily I don’t use these LLMs often enough to justify even using it for free
This is why they want the “AI revolution” to make computing too expensive for anyone but them. It’s about way more than control of copyright, more than seizing the means of production for themselves: they want to be able to control narratives, censor the press (established journalism and independent blog/forum posting and socials), and monitor individuals and groups that may oppose them or present dissenting viewpoints. They want summaries they can control, they want one click censorship, and they want us to rent the privilege from them, creating a permanent information-peasant class. They want insider information on markets, they want to know voter sentiment, they want to sway investors and politics to their whims via system prompts.
We already saw Elon try it (with hillariously bad results) when Grok wouldn’t shut up about “white genocide” in South Africa. Elon is just such a spectacular failson grifter that his plan had no nuance and was plainly obvious.
But now we know for sure.
they want an economic moat. otherwise there’s very little additional value over the open weight models which are catching up fast.
Seize the means of (token) production!
A good reason to run local.
Not letting people do things is a great way to dissuade customers from using your hyperscaler service. Except we don’t want anyone using AI to make slop that denigrates others or involves information hazards.
That might be why Musk and Zuckerberg say don’t in their ToS but yhen let you do it anyway; tokens are tokens are profit.
But local brew will even do those things anyway.
Unfortunately I don’t think we can put this genie back in the bottle. These billionaires can afford to out AI us. Running local is great for not giving them money, but you’ll never have even nearly the most capable models.
I don’t think that really matters in this context. If the local models can do these things already, the fact that frontier models can do even more does not change that fact or eliminate that problem. Add on to that the fact that the local models are improving at a faster rate than the frontier models and they’re really going to have a hard time making money renting this technology in the long run. Like with cars: my car has nowhere near the capabilities of the best or most powerful car, but it still does literally everything I could ever want, and I never ever find myself wishing my car could drag more or move faster. That same sort of thing applies to AI capabilities: It makes no functional difference to me that my local model can’t, just for example, resequence DNA in real-time, because I have no need for that and never will.
Why would they want to rexouoe their losses? They haven’t yet.
Protections for me, not for thee
You will own nothing and be happy, megacorporations.
Well I own no Microsoft or epic products and I am happy, so it seems to be working.
Oddly enough, even if you use M$ or Epic products, you do not own them.
For real! Even the old Microsoft hardware was licensed, not owned, if I remember correctly.
I was pretty curious as to how the mega corporations would react to ai being able to “clone” their paid products, especially because all they want is to prevent ai from being regulated
I really don’t know how to feel about this, to be honest. I’m definitely not on the corporate side but I also just don’t like vibe coding/generative ai. At the same time I think the ports are pretty interesting (alongside the game in another game things, like Minecraft in GTA 5)
You can be happy that corpos are getting a taste of their medecine and sad that we are burning the planet to decompile Mario and Halo and mix them together.
This is TERRIBLE! RICH PEOPLE owned those Assests being Stolen! WHY couldn’t it JUST be POOR People being Stolen from?
-The US Government!
Let them fight
Hasn’t there already been precedent that copyright doesn’t cover AI generated works? So how to these companies plan on legally selling their games, when it’s actually legal to just copy and share them?
Technically speaking, a cleanroom reverse-engineered program isn’t illegal (this is how IBM PC clones were allowed to exist), at least in the US.
On the other hand, since AI cannot hold a copyright, the prompters cannot sue if, say, Sony or Microsoft just take their code and sell it.
Most decompiled games need a copy of the original game for assets (graphics, textures, etc) since those wouldn’t be recreated via AI, and shipping with them would be copyright infringement.
Requirement for “cleanroom” development" are very strict. You’d have to disregard anyone who could have had just the tiniest plausible chance of having seen the tiniest part of the code.
Any LLM usage would invalidate the cleanroom premise.
And more to the point, the cleanroom scenario were some people producing an ‘interface specification’ working backwards from the binary, not decompiling it. If they had decompiled the source code and passed that on, that would not be cleanroom.
This also hinges upon the ‘cloned’ bit being an ABI/API, which by itself is not considered substantial enough for copyright protection.
So the concept of an AI decompilation of a whole application being considered cleanroom and safe is a bizarre concept that seems to spring from wishful thinking rather than anything vaguely realistic.
It should invalidate it, I’m not sure it will.
no im talking about the reverse, of microsoft using ai to make their new games. further in the article.
The critical thing in the IBM BIOS case is that the ABI surface was deemed too trivial to be worthy of copyright protection, and the implementation was credibly not cloned.
When you get to the point of the interface presented to human, I wager there would be consensus that is substantiave enough content there. Also an actual decompile would not be “clean room”.
Purely generated AI content can’t be copyrighted.
However, mix some human effort in, the combined work can be copyrighted. In theory if you can prove a specific thing is purely AI output, it is fair game. Good luck doing so with proof.
The cases cited in this argument all had the would be rights holder stating flat out it was untouched by human hands. Once they did anything to it, the result would be “transformative” and the AI ness won’t count.
Also in this case, the games being decompiled were pre LLM. An LLM clone doesn’t spare the clone of legal issues. A company tried this argument that the knock off legal papers were AI and this fair game and they lost. When Getty sued, the counter argument was that output could be infringing, but it would be the responsibility of the operator.
Conveniently for the rich people, they have rights to make knockoff machines by ingesting everything without permission, but copyright of course still counts for their purposes.
i was talking about the new ai games being generated by microsoft
Then refer to my first point, a pure AI generated output is likely to be uncopyrightable (the two commonly cited cases are the one where someone tried to assert copyright over photos taken by primates, and another where someone tried to assert copyright over music that was generated by a computer without human curation).
However, once they assert some transformative human involvement is mixed in, the combined work is copyrightable. So they do some token human manipulations of slop, keep the knowledge of what is slop and what is treated/human private and confidential, poof, copyright of ‘lightly treated slop’. Similar to how the little mermad generally is public domain, however Disney’s Ariel is copyrightable, despite originating from material exempt from copyright.
Trademark
Can we point robots as Let’s Play videos and ask them to recreate the games being played yet?
I’ve been thinking about this for updating out of date mods
I’d imagine that the context window you’d need to perform such a feat would be so large that it would be impossible, even with all the compute we are currently throwing at AI models. It would at best be financially impractical.
