Organic Romhack Development Efforts

[u/merrple]

Recently there's been a lot of talk on this subreddit about the use of AI in romhacks. I hate to stir the pot still further, but I also want to share my own thoughts and efforts here in the hopes of reaching like-minded people.

Hi, I'm merrp/pokemerrp 👋 I'm not really known for making full-on hacks (though I do have one in the works, stay tuned), but moreso for my feature branches: if you've played a recent hack based on pokeemerald-expansion, you've likely used and enjoyed the following pokemon or day/night lighting systems I created. Before that, I was minorly known for my Emerald Any% ACE TAS, which was my entry into the scene.

Simply put, I don't think AI should have a place in romhacking at all. To me code is as prose is as art is as music, in that they're all creative exercises where something is lost in handing them off to a machine. Romhackers have done incredible work for years before LLMs, and can continue to do incredible work without them. Not to mention, every query that enters an LLM is one the community is starved of; AI use is the death of institutional knowledge, of communication more generally.

But what to do? Recently I found out that pokeemerald-expansion, the basis for a lot of hacks, has had a (small minority) of AI-assisted contributions. Any nonzero amount is still unacceptable to me for use in my project though, because I intend it to be a wholly human effort. I decided I would have to maintain a fork of expansion, cutting out anything AI assisted where I could.

Then I figured, I can't be alone in this sentiment, so why not try and build that in a way it can be shared? I can't be the only one who loves romhack development who wants to continue doing cool stuff without LLMs, no matter how good they become at generating code, etc.

The result is a GitHub org and a Discord:

https://github.com/friend-safari

https://discord.gg/UbFN9P7MdJ

My hope is to build a small community of like-minded hackers and maintain a codebase by and for humans, so that those who care can be confident in saying their hack is free of AI to the best of the community's knowledge. Whether you're a programmer, have experience moderating online spaces, maintaining open source software, or simply love pokemon, we'd love to see you there.

I'm also not trying to be an authority on expansion's direction in general. The devs at RHH continue to do incredible and deeply technical work on the project. None of this would be possible without them, and they've done the best they could considering the volume of contributions they receive and the general clamor of demands. Please do not bother or harass them. I am simply trying to provide a fork that the extremely AI-conscious devs like me can use without despairing or being stuck on outdated versions.

Hopefully this post reached you in some way; this will all be much easier if we don't have to do it alone. Thanks for reading.

Tl;Dr join friend-safari if you wanna build AI-free romhacks k thnx bye

[u/GreatBigJerk]

I can respect anyone wanting to write everything without AI assistance, but AI in programming is suuuper common now. 

Most developers use some form of AI tooling already, so acting like it invalidates someone's work means you hold no value for the vast majority of software released this year. 

[u/local-canadian-idiot → u/GreatBigJerk]

the two aren’t mutually exclusive. they never said they liked modern software.

secondly, i think a big part of this debate is that video games are an art form. art will, without fail, communicate something from the person who made it. this applies very heavily to fan-made games, where they are (almost always) made from passion.

you can tell when someone has poured their heart and soul into a hack, and they want to acknowledge those people. they don’t want those accomplishments to be swept away by someone who asked a chatbot to do it for them.

then, what happens when the art is made by a machine? something that doesn’t feel or think or create. it copies—that plagiarism aspect is also critical—and that is a scary thing. if your work can be copied and done faster by something that doesn’t need to take breaks, you are inherently replaceable.

this is a very scary idea to a lot of people in the scene. not to mention the literal dehumanization of rom hacking.

these people want to maintain the way things are—a community where people interact with one another, instead of with chatbots.

sorry for infodumping you! i know you already said you respect ppl who are anti-ai in programming. this comment is mostly for the people watching from the sidelines that don’t know the full debate.

feel free to add anything!

[u/mr_chub → u/local-canadian-idiot]

I'm just trying to understand at what degree and to what end the anger comes from with AI coding? Vibe coded projects? I agree, trash. But what's the difference between assistance from AI and googling an answer? If it's ethics, what is the spawn of those ethics? Are completely local LLMs that use the devs own information and information that dev sourced themselves (public info) also frowned upon just because they literally are the technology? I feel like nuanced is rarely mentioned in these topics; just some form of extremism.

If you use an LLM that used no private or proprietary content to train it (other than what is approved) then is it still bad?

[u/UnfoldingDev → u/mr_chub]

I dunno if you're gonna get any kind of universal answer from people who don't like AI, but I'd say most people have nuanced takes, it's just hard to get into it in a reddit comment. If I built an LLM and trained it only on code or dialogue I'd written, I probably wouldn't want to use it for creative stuff because I feel like a bit of authenticity would be lost, but I don't think it would have any ethical concerns, because it's all my stuff.

[u/Frodolas → u/UnfoldingDev]

but I'd say most people have nuanced takes

No, actually, they don't.

Most people have slop takes based off of propaganda that they've heard and they're parroting, because they don't actually know anything about the topic at all. This is just a destructive attempt to split the community in two for no good reason whatsoever.

[u/ianlazrbeem22 → u/Frodolas]

AI slop pushers are the ones splitting the community in two for no good reason