The website decomp.dev said Thursday that it is shutting down because “the community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by AI, and that projects that once required intense collaboration between people with different skills can now be done trivially with AI. The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI.
“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site.
But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”
AI-powered video game decomps and recomps (recompiling code after modifying it) are everywhere. People have, for example, used AI to put Mario into Elden Ring, port games to platforms they were never designed to work on, or to combine various games in any permutations you could possibly imagine. In recent days, tools specifically designed to decomp games with AI have popped up, such as "decomp.wtf," which promises to "point the AI agent you already use at a game you own. decomp.wtf turns it back into C, one function at a time, and checks every function byte for byte against the original."
Decomp.dev was a collaborative website that hosted file libraries and tools for reverse engineering, re-coding, and decompiling existing video games, meaning taking an existing game and recreating its source code. Decompiling a video game can be done for a variety of reasons and is popular in a few different niches of video game fandom. Speed runners decompile video games to find potential glitches or advantages they can use to beat a game faster; hobbyists decompile video games to port them to new platforms or to emulate them (for example, making Super Mario 64 run natively on PC); modders decompile games so they can more easily modify them; archivists decompile games to recreate code that may be lost; and some people decompile games just for the challenge.
Encounter wrote that the use of AI in the community has sped things up to the point where it has become overwhelming to track human-led projects, and people using AI have taken existing, human-led AI projects and have created “hostile forks” of them, where open-source code written by humans is taken and “finished” by AI: “These kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.” Encounter added, “anyone with an AI subscription can manage to create a port or static recompilation that functions at a basic level […] While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”
Consider this, though;
Corporations will now be forced to reckon with the fact that IP is meaningless thanks to their new toys. Anything extant is fair game for AI? Buckle the fuck up, then, 'cause that's a very nice everything you have there, and it'd be a shame of somebody AI'd it. Which they will. And it'll either be crowd-sourced like these game de-re-comps, or it'll be the unofficial "rogue agent" breaking all your shit wide open because you also have your own "rogue agents" talking to theirs.
Legislation will happen sooner this way, and while the damage will undoubtedly have been done to your average creative intellectual in the short term, at least creative intellectuals are capable of adapting to the new. The shackles that will rightfully-but-belatedly be placed on AI once this comes to a head will genuinely cripple many of these companies who went literally ALL FUCKING IN on AI.
It may yet still be too little too late in terms of a great many things we have so long taken for granted, but take a look at the PS5 leak and Sony's take on ownership alongside all this and tell me that isn't the most hilariously ironic thing that could happen to them.
All this shit is about to come right back around, and they've all talked themselves into a corner that this is for the good of everyone that it works like it does. Bet, bitches, here comes the slop that is on the surface totally indistinguishable from your actual product that is also now inextricably linked to your brand. Y'all are fucked and have nobody to blame but yourselves.
Note this theory of "if AI can clone/decompile, then it is fair game" is a pretty baseless "legal theory". People are stitching together incomplete understandings of cases. It is kind of like all those "sovereign citizen" legal theories where people think they have the magical legal recipe only to get slapped hard when they have to try to reconcile that with a real court.
While this is a perfectly valid point you make, all these companies have spent the past couple years arguing that all this is fair game as long as AI does it.
"Rogue agents?" Do you really believe that? Which reminds me, I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn if so. Act fast I'll even throw in the one next to it for half off.
There are currently no laws that apply to this BS directly and that is precisely the problem that we have all had with AI bros for so long, and it is the problem they are about to run smack into, but not before their own toys cannibalize everything they've built into a zombified approximation of itself with bits of other ideas grafted on the side like some Lovecraftian nightmare program. And it'll be just as maddeningly incomprehensible and their ultimate ruin the moment they behold it for what it truly is.
Again, that doesn't mean regular folks won't be caught up in the cascade effects all this will cause, but when the laws go up to rein the bullshit in - and one way or another they surely will - it isn't going to have to be you and me who figure out how to work without AI. Like I said, these companies are talking themselves blue in the face that IP doesn't apply to AI. And now its coming back to bite them.
This is only going to cascade. And when the real court does get involved, the AI bros' own legal arguments will work against them in so many cases for talking out both sides of their mouth all the damn time.
I'm not playing with AI and have gone out of my way to avoid updating my tech with anything AI these days. Linus has made that an exercise in futility given my current OS, but I am nobody and trust that my standard security measures - which are definitely above the average Mac/windows user - will continue to keep me safe from the average threat I am more than likely to face.
I think your sovereign citizen comparison was apt, but even in the name of corporate interests, I don't see it going against precedent when push actually comes to shove; these stupid bastards wouldn't stand for anybody else's hands on their pie and that's what they've inadvertently been arguing for with how things are developing.
What they have so far argued is that it isn't infringement until an operator asks for output that infringes, and then it is the operators fault. I hate that argument, but so far they sidestep the dicey issue by putting the burden on the operator.
The rogue agent thing is bullshit, but we have shitty criminal enforcement and complicit would-be plaintiffs rather than a lack of law.
They did for example rule against that one company ripping off anothers legal material despite the "but AI" defense. The court didn't care one way or the other about the process, they just cared that the output was obviously infringement. AI or no AI.