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simonwillison.netarticle

AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.

Simon Willison's link post points to indie developer Popcar's piece on the recent wave of AI-powered decompilation of existing games. The wave has produced mashups between games and a boom in preservation projects that get old games running on new hardware, often in the browser via WebAssembly. The quoted passages weigh the downside, where anyone can decompile and reuse paid software and companies can copy competitors, against the upside, where people can keep software they bought after servers shut down.

TL;DR AI-assisted decompilation of games is booming, enabling preservation and WebAssembly ports but also raising worries about copying and forced open-sourcing of paid software.

Organisations named here

  • Popcar
  • Simon Willison

Technologies named here

  • WebAssembly

Techniques named here

  • AI-powered decompilation