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.

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[–] 140 points 1 week ago

Protections for me, not for thee

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  • [–] 127 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    You will own nothing and be happy, megacorporations.

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  • [–] 102 points 1 week ago

    This is TERRIBLE! RICH PEOPLE owned those Assests being Stolen! WHY couldn't it JUST be POOR People being Stolen from?

    -The US Government!

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  • [–] 85 points 1 week ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 week ago

    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

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    [–] 24 points 1 week ago (10 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 18 points 1 week ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago

    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".

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    i was talking about the new ai games being generated by microsoft

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 week ago*

    I’m not advocating for you to rip off the big corps.

    ‐wink- ‐wink-

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  • [–] 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    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)

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  • [–] 21 points 1 week ago

    This is PRO-AI shit.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago

    No they did not. They agreed that using AI for purpose other than to increase corporate value is criminal activity.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Neat, so when are they shutting down copilot?

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  • [–] 16 points 1 week ago*

    Let them fight

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  • [–] 27 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    We're going to find out that AI was trained on stolen source code and isn't actually reverse engineering anything.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    It's an n-dimensional database of values. Not conscious thought. A digital "neuron" is no more conscious than a lab-grown chicken wing.

    It can barf back what is stored inside. It can generate results by computation using tools it knows.

    It can not create, it can not think, it can not grow.

    Useful for speeding up automated tasks, topical research, parsing datasets for patterns rapidly. That's basically it.

    Playing pretend has generated so much money for the rich crazy few. Play time is over.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I've assumed this is the case the entire time. It got fed every last shred of code anyone could get their hands on because coding is the only industry they have anyone inside convinced that AI is a great (or even good) thing.

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  • [–] 50 points 1 week ago (7 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 65 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    These are great screenshots. Makes his posts super readable.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    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.

    ☝️ 1
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  • [–] 15 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago

    Didn't xbox start a division to do this?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Can we point robots as Let’s Play videos and ask them to recreate the games being played yet?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    can we just rescind their business licenses already?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    Good for them! Maybe, just maybe, this will bring some advancement to the subject.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

    [Removed comment about systems that will code-on-the-go and the end of game engines/software as we know it.]

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    that Sounds like abysmal dogshit

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

    Look, I genuinely mean this: Horses are better than cars. A car doesn't care about you. A car isn't like having a friend where ever you go. A car won't nurture your empathy. Cars go too fast, cars are for people in a rush. Cars kill far more people than horses. Cars aren't self-driving. A car won't avoid damage.

    Horses are better than cars. I mean that.

    Cars sound like abysmal dogshit. I'm not advocating for cars, or AI.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago (2 children)
  • [–] -2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Hurrr durrr retard.

    Seeing where something is going isn't the same as advocating for it, ya dumb bitch.

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