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.

There are a lot of mature open source projects out there. I wish people would put their time there instead of paying the slop machine to shit out an un-maintained copy

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.

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

Decompliation projects are cool when they're used to extend functionality beyond what could be done in the original game and romhacks. It's awesome to see Super Mario 64 with uncapped framerate and a modern camera.

But a lot of these projects kinda seem like they're not adding anything that can't already be emulated. I suppose just having a decompilation is step one that can enable future enhancements, but it seems like recently there are far more of these being slopped out than there are modders interested in doing anything with them.

The fact that a lot of them are just slop now is kind of the problem.

Recompilations are excellent.

The slop-based recompilations are worse than useless because:

1. They discourage humans from making recompilations based on the hard work of understanding the target software, since "There is already a recompilation."

2. Slop recompilations "authors" typically don't understand the target software well enough to implement the typical 10% of functionality the LLM fails to furnish.

3. The LLM generates such unreadable code that not even god could debug it. So it might as well be a binary itself.

Yes it is the way to do it. There isn't another way or it would have been done already.

Yes they have been lobbying hard for ages to get AI regulated so only they can control how it's used.

Stable? Maintained? Some will, some won't.

The corporations need to learn they will own nothing and be happy.

What I think is this will now be the reason why plenty of "AI first" companies will rethink their stance on AI.

I feel that its karmic retribution. These companies stole everything then started generating code and through corruption they were able to set the precedent that AI is not copyright infringement. All the companies embraced it with open arms.

Now to see it being used to open up and fosswash these proprietary products and its very funny, I'm waiting for the big companies reaction. I can't wait for them to clutch their pearls.

I kinda hope it leads to another nail in the coffin for genAI. Let the lawyers fight the genAI companies and people involved and hope it only leads to harsh punishments and air tight restrictions for the genAI companies/gears¹. That's the ideal future, but in reality it'll most likely lead to reverse engineering and decompiling software to be made illegal if anyone pursues this legally.

As for the software, considering you cannot even trust generative AI giving the right information even if it's giving you source links, I would only use it on the most air gapped system possible to avoid the probable massive amounts of bugs and vulnerabilities that are in it due to the gear¹ "working" on it most likely not knowing what literally any of the code does. Even then, I wouldn't even download it because I don't trust that they haven't somehow fucked up and put up a highly infected download. Plus, I ain't being a statistic as someone who downloaded that slop because it would show that more users are downloading that probable accidental malware.

¹ Aster Principle Def.: human(s) who willingly use(s) generative artificial intelligence ( genAI )

From a copyright standpoint, distributing reverse-engineered code made by decompiling existing software is almost certainly illegal. If a person wanted to create an FOSS clone of some software, they would have to follow the 'clean room' process, and even that doesn't save you from violating patents. Adobe and the other victims here have legal grounds to remove these projecs from the internet under dmca. Although AI companies seem to be able to ignore most laws these days.

If someone out there is actually looking for alternatives to corporate slopware, I would urge them to join the FOSS community where we build these things ourselves, rather than succumbing to the vibe sickness.

Burning tokens to destabilise monopolies -

Not too happy about our environment burning but creating mischief rather than creating bad flyers has to be a win.

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).

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.

There seems to be a pattern of closed source software spawning open source equivalents, so I look at AI really just being an accelerant to this trend. Software companies are screwed.

Game companies may have more to stand on as they can claim copyright and trademark assets on their games. That said, the gaming industry is in a generational low and I don't know how it can recover.

Do we know this is decompilation? The Adobe Suite one seems to be more a replication of form and function than a true decompilation of the existing software. The interface is easy to replicate, and then each tool and function within it is being recreated based on what it does. The project themselves claim that is how they've done it, and it's feasible. It also seems to be entirely legal.

Whether it is right or wrong, it really brings into focus how the copyright laws are. They've been used to bash individual end users for decades, but now we're seeing they actually seem to have no effect on the AI companies stealing vast troves of data to train their models. We're also seeing that the tools can be used to do perfectly legal things that have been done manually for decades in the open source community. You can copyright specific code, but you can't copyright a specific GUI or broad function.

I'm doubt when companies were jumping on to the AI band wagon that they envisioned that AI could be used to totally undermine all the "value" they'd built in their businesses with proprietary software that was just too difficult to replicate. Now it seems to be so extremely easy to replicate that proprietary software in general may be in serious trouble as a business model.

I've played with the storycraft tools; it's actually mindboggling how functional they are with 10 projects that all are already at alpha software level, and useable for basic tasks. Whether or not these projects actually come to fruition is kinda irrelevant; we've been shown it can be done and with surprising ease.

Decompilation tools aren't new, though AI might lower the bar in various ways.

I don't think that someone's likely going to be able to successfully claim in courts that the decompiled work is free of copyright, as it's a duplicate of the original (has substantial similarity) and directly replaces it; those are elements of infringement. A human can't just sit down with a book and write a copy of it, word-by-word, and claim that they created the new book. They can read from a book and take influences from it, but not simply line-by-line copy it without infringing, and my expectation is that courts will probably treat an agentic AI doing so the same way as a human.

I think that it's probably mostly impactful in terms of ability to help analyze and defeat DRM systems, something that is technically-impactful, but not legally-impactful. Some DRM systems may just not be practical any more.

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.

I'm worried the opposite will happen too. Replicating open source projects and swapping to a commercial license is pretty trivial.

The use of AI in these projects is perfectly fine. Just as it is in all other software development.