I have had an influx of these game decomps on my Instagram recently and was wondering why so many were appearing out of nowhere. Shortly after that influx, the open-sourcing Adobe Suit thing happened and again its on my feed. Most of these projects use AI to make it easier to decomply these things and understand why it was used but I am a bit worried about the implications. As in, will these decomps actually be stable? Will they be maintained? Will companies start lobbying for AI laws harder now, in a way it benefits them and not us?
I personally stay away from AI due to the many issues AI brings but I am a fan of people fighting big companies but is this the way to do it?
It’s the good old copyright Mexican standoff. If it is ruled that decompilations are illegal, that shoots freedom in the foot, and even legal clean-room decomps can be taken out, but also ai models could be much more copyright restricted. It’s both a win and a loss for everyone, as tightening the copyright noose is exactly what companies want, so they have a lot more ammo to shoot at foss projects and competition with.
The other way is that this is considered fair use, as the ai is not verbatim recreating code, it’s recreating its own interpretation of the code, which is a flying spaghetti monster that only looks somewhat like the real thing only if you don’t open the hood. This, of course, opens the door to being able to use ai models to break down things legally, a win for decompilation, a win for security researchers, but also a big L as well, as now obscuring code behind closed source is not good enough.
In either case, hackers and do-bads will run their own models and decompile things faster to find flaws and break stuff. Making it illegal doesn’t stop determined badders from doing it. Pandora’s box is already open, there is no undoing this without society as a whole getting washed away.
They can train AI on the entire internet and all it’s copyrighted content, that’s no problem they say. But we train AI on copyrighted code and it’s different? Yeah seems like something they’d cry foul about.
Free all software. Death to DRM.
Waste of energy. I am not anti-AI, I think it’s good in software development when used in a quite moderate amount and the developer understand every single word it spits out. When I use Claude sometimes, I can never help not rewriting what it spits out, it just doesn’t code the way I would. It’s especially often bad with bash scripts, and I am not a bash pro at all.
These recomps, and even these recent PS5 emulators, are hella vibecoded, so I am personally staying extremely far away from them. Also, this Adobe suite is supposedly barely usable, so there’s that.
It writes bash scripts just like one colleague of mine has long written. Of all the styles to land on, it managed to land on the worst one I had ever seen.
My opinion? Decompiled software has always existed in a legal gray area, it just hasn’t been worth ruling on because of how challenging it’s been to decompile software. AI seems to have allowed sloppers to get in on the action, and given how many sloppers have zero concept of nuance, they’re being very loud about their efforts. In particular, releasing decompiled paid software seems like the easiest way to get companies on your ass. You’re probably breaking half a dozen established and existing laws, especially since some of these projects are selling their decompilation. I expect the legal system to step in and rule in favor of the companies.
To summarize, just like in every other field, AI sloppers are ruining it for everyone
Recompilations are excellent.
The slop-based recompilations are worse than useless because:
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They discourage humans from making recompilations based on the hard work of understanding the target software, since “There is already a recompilation.”
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Slop recompilations “authors” typically don’t understand the target software well enough to implement the typical 10% of functionality the LLM fails to furnish.
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The LLM generates such unreadable code that not even god could debug it. So it might as well be a binary itself.
Where are the decompiles of Photoshop in the last 30 years before LLM then?
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No, I am saying, where the fuck are all those decompilations of multi million LoC projects? They had like 30 years head start. They didn’t exist in the capacity that opus 5.5 enabled. I think that much is pretty obvious.
Curiously, all those folk that scream and shout about slop claim that the code has to be garbage. Even if that were the case, would the average user care?
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What I think is this will now be the reason why plenty of “AI first” companies will rethink their stance on AI.
For older games, where source code may not exist anymore and modding and preservation are severely hampered by this lack of source code, I can see the use of AI to build reverse engineered source code as a useful tool. For modern or brand new games, it seems like an irresponsible use of the tool. And there will be all kinds of legal issues surrounding the posting of the reverse engineered code online.
I can also see this as having some utility for checking if closed source applications are borrowing code from open source projects without proper attribution and/or following of the open source license. I would think that commercial projects would see this as an especially scary prospect as they begin to incorporate AI into their development pipelines. Could GPL’d or Copy Left source code work its way into the closed source project and end up opening the company up to liability? If so, this sort of reverse engineering may be the only way that is discovered. Which, may mean that this sort of analysis has a very useful purpose. Though again, posting the resultant code online seems kinda sketchy.
As another tangent, I’ve personally used AI reverse engineering for examining malware. I’ve run across samples in my work which I could deobfuscate and reverse engineer by hand. But that will take considerable time (hours at minimum, days on the outside). During a security investigation, time is often a luxury we don’t have. Being able to use an AI agent with access to REMNux and the REMNux MCP can cut hours to days off the initial analysis. Sure, there are always issues with hallucinations and the agent just failing at its analysis (I’ve already seen both). But, it can give a first pass at something very fast. That may mean IoCs and TTPs we can hunt on quickly to validate scope and containment.
AI is a tool, it’s going to be used for things both good and bad. And it’s going to take us a while to sort out the details and safeguards around it as we go.
In theory I am for it. Practically it is pissing off really powerful.compa ies, and with the government as it is, the backlash will likely be severe, and highly detrimental to floss and our freedoms in general. Rich powerful people.do not take kindly to revenue streams being interrupted.
I’d rather see open source software get the rescources they need to “catch up” to the monopolies.
The stuff ai is spitting out won’t be easy to maintain and any securrity vunerabilites will go unpatched. Attempting to maintain this software with ai will just result in making more dataceneters and more communities will be fucked over.
However, if adobe and microsoft sucesfully claim ai has stolen their code, than they might set the legal president that AI has to follow copyright laws. Which could help artists (wishfull thinking, I know).
I personally stay away from AI due to the many issues AI brings.
I am a fan of people fighting big companies.
I have had an influx of these game decomps on my Instagram recently.
I am not trying to be pedantic, but Instagram is “AI.” It was toxic AI before LLMs were a popular thing. Participating in their algorithm is basically everything dystopian about the world of machine learning, concentrated in one service. And using it helps Meta perpetuate it more than using any LLM does.
Again, I don’t mean to be hostile; maybe you use it sparingly in some cleaner way, and I’m not saying everything on Instagram is bad; quite the contrary.
But I just want to make what Instagram runs it crystal clear.
Yeah, I am aware. I mostly use Instagram to follow artists and friends (since nobody wants to swap to alternatives). I try to use the alternatives as much as possible and if someone I like is on the alternative, I’d usually follow them there.
