AI is great about putting out something like a human half assing whatever it is doing. Looks ok at a glance but there are problems when you look into the details.

I'm so fucking sick of AI slop.

Please don't take this as a defence of AI, but I saw this with human-led decomp projects too.

I was pretty active in the Pokemon hacking scene a few years back, and I happen to have a friend who has made a very popular rom hack (not giving names, but if you are interested in those kind of things, you probably played his game), and he told me that he tried to switch from binary hacking to decomp, but the decomp had so many insidious bugs, especially in the battle system, that he much rather keep making hacks with HMA (the currently popular universal hacking tool) rather than deal with that can of worms.

I also happen to be a huge Ace Combat fan, and the recomp project of AC6 is miles better than what the emulator offered just a year ago. If it wasn't for AI, I would still be forced to use my OG X360 to have anything resembling a good experience on that game. The AI-led recomp is just as good as the game on original hardware, and gives me the chance to play the since-delisted DLCs too.

I don't think this is as black and white as saying "human-made good, AI-made bad". It's a matter of how much care the person behind the decomp/recomp puts into it, AI or not.

Which sucks, because I think the best aspect of these projects was the community that would develop around them, the treasure trove of knowledge that someone would gather by working on them, and, as dumb as it sounds, the friends you made along the way. Some of my best friends, I got to know through the Pokemon hacking scene, and it wouldn't have happened if everything was a matter of writing a bunch of prompts on an LLM. The fact that AI made them so easy, and that they are completely indistinguishable from human-led projects (aside from looking at the publication date) is sad. I think that's the worst part of this situation.

That's a shame because if AI was used as a tool, it would still have the community helping to make the ports functional.

Hand created ports also had performance issues, missing features, etc that took years for the community to fix.

It seems like it's a problem of over hyping the results like what has happened with AI everywhere.

Couldn't this be mitigated by better attention on the part of the human operator? Like, use the ai to crack it open, then actually go back through and verify that everything actually works?

It's a massive trend right now and everyone is trying to vibecode their own decomps/ports, often people who have no idea what they're doing.

There are plenty of AI-assisted ones that are actually good, but they're hard to find amidst the untested slop. It doesn't help that a lot of these self-proclaimed "native PC ports" just turn out to be an emulator packaged with the game.

You might be conflating decomps with ports that use decomps as a base.

A decompilation means taking a binary and reverse engineering source code that, when compiled, will produce an identical binary targeting the same platform.

AI has also been ruining decomps, making it a race and a numbers game, rather than focusing on quality and the production of human-readable code and the long-term documentation of how a game functions for long term preservation.

You don't think low-effort and easy can be the same?

cost the guy $56k worth of tokens

First of all, lol.

Second of all, decompiling a binary in a clean room setting is not pointless just because leaked source code exists, because the decompilation can legally be used to make projects based on it whereas the leaked source code cannot be touched without facing the wrath of Nintendo lawyers.

Now, using AI to decompile a binary will likely not produce human-readable code, and will ultimately be pointless for things like studying code, producing high quality ports and mods, etc., but if a human or a group of humans did it, it can be extremely useful.

Yeah, more people need to be taught that generative AI models are literally auto-correct like on their phones. It is the gigantic, multi-trillion-dollar, ultra high tech, ultra high powered version of auto correct, but that's what it is. Would they trust something important that, sight unseen?

For those of us who write code, it can be handy to have an auto correct that can suggest chunks of code rather than just the next word or filling in a partially typed variable name. But you have to treat it like a suggestion, and read the suggestion, and make a conscious decision about whether that is how you want it. Giving up your agency is bad, but that is what a huge portion of the population seems to want to do at every turn. Not having to do anything is a nice-sounding option to have, but it's not good for your brain or body.

But on top of that, as an engineer, you are also losing out on familiarity with the design when you give up that agency. I find that when I let the neural net in my head -- the one made out of actual neurons -- get more exposure to the internal workings of a system, it is better at helping me diagnose problems with our product more quickly and intuitively.

It is sad! I've always loved being part of small communities and to see one get destroyed like this and so quickly is really sad.

AI doesn't build and maintain itself. Unless that changes, which I currently see no clear line of sight to, then it is just another asset primarily controlled and directed by rich people. Tools like that are always political.

I could definitely imagine something like GTA6 getting cracked and then half-assedly ported to PS3 by AI. Let the greed and hubris of all the companies who thought they could fire all their talent and corner the market on slopbased IP rehashes for infinite profit at minimal cost fire back on them.

I get your point, and since this project has only been up for two years it's not too much history being lost.

However, I also empathize with the perspective of the site maintainer as well. There's a lot more chaff to be separated from the wheat with the deluge of vibecoded submissions. I think keeping a frozen record of the site might be best to provide a point-in-time snapshot of where human-based progress of decompilation has gotten to. Someone else can manage the sifting through the AI slop, because that's not what the maintainer signed up for.

It may feel that way, but it's not an asshole move. We are all struggling with mental health and existential dread in the face of what sometimes seems to be a genuine polycrisis that includes an AI apocalypse. Some people deal with this stress more effectively than others, but it doesn't make someone an asshole when they just can't take it anymore and you've gotta expect some people are going to crash out pretty hard. This is a lot milder than how some people are going to inevitably crash out, and this is not going to be the only situation like this.