> "... the 2020 release of the amazing Super Mario 64 decomp SM64 showed that hundreds of hours of painstaking work could unlock ports, deep mods, community translations/expansions, and academic study of classic titles. In the last couple years decomp/recomp has been turbo-charged with LLM agent assistance. Of course, there's now the usual spectrum between carefully guided, curated efforts being accelerated and generally unhelpful slop."
It's true that AI slop is currently an epidemic that's causing lots of annoyance and problems. It's also true that LLMs can be a helpful labor-saving tool when deployed with precision, care and intent by an experienced, thoughtful developer.
I totally understand why many projects have drawn a hard 'No AI' line, whether for pragmatic reasons of 1) Being buried under low-quality PRs, or 2) Valid concerns that even human-reviewed AI code can too easily become a slippery slope toward losing understanding and 'deep quality'. I also respect the projects which have banned AI for 3) Purely philosophical or aesthetic reasons of preferring '100% human' artisanal craft. It's all good and valid.
I get the reflexive reaction to Ant's prohibition by some in the retro community of, basically, "Good riddance!" My concern is specifically that in a misguided attempt to stop illegal misuse, Ant's over-broad rule also removes the option for any experienced, thoughtful retro developer to ever even consider if Claude Opus Super-Fable 9.5, deployed with precision, care and intent, might avoid subjecting themselves to certain brutally repetitive multi-hour tasks.
While I respect #3 above, personally, I'm more in the #1 and #2 camp. I remain guardedly hopeful that maybe in due time the pure AI slop from over-enthusiastic newbies playing with their shiny new magic genie will diminish and concern #1 will gradually be less of a problem, and that over time good devs will gain the hard-won experience required to avoid the slippery slope of #2. Assuming OAI follows Ant's over-cautious lead, I'd hate to be posting here in 5 years: "Remember that 6 months back when frontier LLMs could work on decomps/recomps? Yeah, it was a complete shitshow but there was also a glimmer of amazing long-term potential to help the scene. Too bad we'll never know if it could have evolved to a better balance over time."
[Note: I realize that frontier lab's prohibitions won't necessarily impact open LLMs (probably... RIAA/MPAA/BSA lobbyists would love to force some bastardized union of Ant/OAI's strongest prohibitions into vague, inflexible law or legal precedent with massive penalties). But I still think it's worth objecting on principle. Actually, two principles: 1) As vintage hardware dies, decomp/recomps can be the only path for some historical retro preservation, and 2) That over-broad ANT prompt is a technically inelegant half-measure that won't even be very effective yet still manages to nuke innocent and truly worthy retro applications.]