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I don't know if it's because I skip most AI conversations, but I think you guys might have failed to discuss some things that have been happening for the last several weeks.
Reverse engineering with AI has gotten really, really good, somehow. It's so good that you can reverse engineer Microsoft Office and host it online for free. It's so good that you can submit your tokens to the Machine God and get World of Warcraft open source. You can now play the original Xbox Halo, but with 32 player coop (seemingly most of the players being Mexican). On your Nintendo 64. In fact, you can play Halo in your browser now. You can play lots of stuff in your browser now. I looked up an old game called Apeiron for old Macintosh, released in 1990 something, just a Centipede clone developed by Ambrosia Software, long since abandonware. There are two ports of it that I found in comments sections on Macintosh Garden. The classic decompilation site is shutting down due to sheer volume. And yes, there's also mods. Flying my Banshee across the Mojave almost makes me wish for a nuclear winter. My Foundry in Warcraft 3 just told me that my AWP research has completed, so I went on a tear across Lordaeron.
On the other side of this, AI can now shut down 70% of the Internet. This bug was in PHP for a long time, and only now discovered, because someone pointed a technological superweapon at it.
What the hell even happens from all this? Can Apple really continue to have a closed ecosystem? Are we going to wake up with no money in our bank accounts? Does proprietary code even exist anymore? How is Steam going to cope with having tens of thousands more games submitted to it? And why now? AI was good for several months up to now. Was it the release of tools that work with agents effectively? This seems a bit more significant than hundreds of mathematical proofs being published at once to me, especially because you can verify it works yourself, on your machine, and see the effects on the world right in front of you.
The economy and way-of-life of the first world as we know it might be ending. But at least we can play Bloodborne natively on PC.
I've recently posted about the Helldivers 2 modding Renaissance enabled by AI. As I had feared, it only lasted a few weeks before the developers cracked down and added Easy AntiCheat to their game. The primary impetus, of course, was the fact that their wallets were being hurt.
I left a suitably negative Steam review.
The good news is that barely a few hours after the patch, mods that bypassed EAC showed up. The bad news is that the overall difficulty of creating new mods has shot up drastically.
Why? My understanding is that the devs removed a lot of the hooks that allowed for easy scripting, and encrypted some of the code. Most modders using OAI or Anthropic models found that they'd no longer engage in intentional circumventing of DRM, leaving aside the classifiers kicking in. Previously, the devs had simply made no effort to obfuscate things, unfortunately the merest act of putting on a lock (no matter how shoddy) means many AI models suddenly develop a newfound respect for property rights.
Clearly people are finding their ways around it. I'd imagine some have resorted to using Chinese models like GLM 5.3 that are more gung-ho about greyhat territory, or found other tricks.
I make no strong claims on the balance between attack and defense here, or if it's going to turn into an endless cat-and-mouse game. We shall see.
I mean, that seems fair. I like the various reimplementation projects, but I don't see what good a decompilation free for all is supposed to bring. Just make your own, it's never been easier.
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