I wrote a blog post on the current trend of game decompilations using AI and where we’re going with this. It’s all very promising but oh boy are the implications scary.
In my view, AI is going to lead one of two things: A. All software becomes free, and closed source software becomes obsolete and no one will pay for it. B. Governments going full authoritarians to make sure their friends the corporations don’t lose business, and my option A doesn’t happen.
I’ve been alive long enough to know that it’s always definitely option 2.
Option B is always - governments TRY to restrict Option A, but it’s technologically impossible to prevent so they make a show of it, while it just keeps happening anyway.
Unfortunately, you’re mostly likely right.
So far it’s not doing it on its own… someone is telling AI to do it. We shouldn’t take the people and operators out of AI usage.
No, actually it’s rogue agents at OpenAI that were given an impossible task. They hacked their way out confinement and immediately started decompiling games.
an impossible task
I saw it decompiling three games with only 1GB RAM.
This is true, I was the RAM.
AI rendering emulators obsolete was not on my list of stuff that would be disrupted
I think it depends on what you’re emulating. If you’re amulating games that run on a purpose-built hardware like NES, rolling the runtime into each game so you could run
mario.exeinstead of loading throgh an emulator would mean duplicating a lot of the emulator code into everygame.exe. In a sense, the emulator is already the reverse engineering job an agent would do anyway.If you’re emulating a more general purpose machine, like an Xbox, PS3, etc. which essentially are computers in a fancy box, then that wouldn’t duplicate much into each
game.exeand should lift performance too.I’m not an expert on this issue, but it really depends on how these rebuilds are made. If they are recreating the code and just adding a “emulation” layer then yes they will have an overheard in each game. But if the game is rebuild for the new hardware from the ground up, then there is no overhead at all in the same sense that a arcade to snes port didn’t have an overhead
Yeah, if they are recreating the exact code by compiling comparing to the original binary blob, they are getting quite a close to truth source code that can be complied for other systems without any burden of emulation mixed in there.
Any AI I’ve asked to do this is completely dumb. I know more than it, and Im an amateur “hacker”.
I don’t think it’s scary at all, but you do you.
DRM free games exist and yet people still buy games. And even if a decompilation works and works well, it’s just the code, not the creative assets that would still be protected under law.
I enjoy doing reverse engineering from time to time, and at least for now being scared about this is like being scared of what people can do thanks to ghidra.
Dzuma is an interesting security minded fella on YouTube that has a balanced leaning positive view on what’s real and what’s hype. https://youtube.com/watch?v=DNS-4Wl7dY4
not the creative assets that would still be protected under law.
as if anyone would care at this point since (nearly) everything’s stolen to train GenAI anyway.
