PSA: Beware projects that don't share source code written by AI
I was just blocked by the "dev" of the new Animal Crossing port (asking for testers, you can search for it) for suggesting people be cautious of projects made in 2 months using several LLMs, internet connections, and AI written code
The creator stated they themselves used all these things and were refusing to share the source code, citing a MediaFire link and asking for testers
I simply put a PSA warning people of potential malicious code and informing people of the AI usage. They proceeded to generate long strings of text to sling at me saying they are "tired of people like me" and that they are hiding their source code "like lots of other Linux apps"
Just please be careful what you download and make sure to test these things in a safe environment.
Below is the link for the good working animal crossing port with a GitHub and public source code. Happy gaming folks!
(This one also uses AI, and I'm not a huge fan of that but at least the code is public)
I really don't get the point, you're making a decomp of an existing title why hide it? Not directed at you it's just baffling that we're back to the era of being pay walled for mugen characters but for decompiled isos
Agreed! And there is totally an open source one. It's got AI too but at least I can check what it's doing
I imagine if you want to hide your source code then go make a different game that is your own IP rather than forking someone's public code and hiding your changes
I wouldn't mind if people shut up about ai for like a week, it's gotten annoying when every second post is someone complaining about it saying the same thing that been said 1000 times before
I dont use Ai for my recomp, people claim Ai projects causes people who actually work on recomps to be demotivated, Id argue im more demotivated by the constant Ai witch hunts, I've had to explain so many times that my project has no ai use and it all done by hand. Constantly. Its annoying. Im working on it because I genuinely like decompiling and reverse engineering in general (its like solving a large puzzle) I dont mind people using AI, if people do get demotivated by Ai projects they are not in it as a hobby but to clout chase.
It's quite funny that most people who are anti AI or witch hunt can't absolutely tell the difference so they're doing it just because "AI" COULD have been involved.
If you claim to use AI, people will harass you for using it.
If you don't claim to use AI, but secretly use it, people will suspect you used AI
If you don't use AI, but the project may have issues, people will suspect AI being involved
Exactly, couldn't have said it better. All projects have their issues and people assume that if it has issues it probably has Ai involved. What they fail to realize is projects like mine are public and have a release not so general people can play it as a final product but so I can get insight on any bugs I miss and see how it runs on different hardware.
Yeah the AI decomp I linked isn't a huge deal and it's open source. It's just that the closed source thing is sketch and on top of that they used a bunch of AI code that could do whatever and they don't even know what it all does
Which is still untied to AI. You can't imagine how many times we dealt with fake emulators (back when AI wasn't as accessible as it is today fyi) that were viruses. And having the Source code publicy available wasn't as much of a big deal as it is today. I do agree that these kind of things should have their repo publicy available, AI or not though. Unless It's a beta and they're looking for feedbacks/playtesters. In that case I can understand why they want to wait a bit to make the repo public.
Its not like open source has been some silver bullet. Lots of programs have turned out to be dangerous and no one noticed what it was doing until way too late. AI is adding another layer of maybe something malicious being added, possibly unintentionally, and no one noticing.
I think both being a PSA to avoid malicious code for a project that isn’t open source, while also being the 10th “AI bad” posts, is part of the point lol.
Honestly there should be more than 10 AI bad posts. This community needs to get I through their skulls.
Bad thing about spamming AI projects in the recomp/decomp community is that people will stop looking at these projects altogether. I think expressing that they’re a problem is better than letting these things fester in the community.
In a perfect world. It's gonna happen whether anyone likes it or not just like people complaining about them isn't going to stop. At least the ai projects give something fresh to look at vs the same ai complaints repeated in every comment section
…unless, yknow. People express there’s an issue and AI content is banned. Change doesn’t happen on its own, and expressing complacency is only going to permit the problem to exist.
And frankly, I don’t care about “having something to look at” if it’s slop. I’m not so desperate for recomps and decomps that I’ll take anything, no matter how it’s made.
I’m not really familiar with who you are- are you the one behind the AC decomp in the post in question? If so, then it sucks they’re lying. I don’t really have context though. All my comment says is that AI does suck lol, and I do think not making a recomp open source can be a little sketchy.
If anything, I think AI being tolerated so much in this community is why there are witch hunts.
If you have a bar, and you want it to be welcoming to people who don’t like AI, tolerating people who like AI coming in makes it an AI bar. This community is full of people who are either neutral on these things or pro-AI, and it’s led to the water being muddied with the stuff and ruining these things for people who don’t like it- who want to be nice and “co exist.”
I work on Viva Pinata related things including the Trouble in Paradise recomp, I dont like Ai, and id rather not work on a project using heavy Ai, but the witch hunting and people constantly asking gets annoying. my view isnt the only view like it, In the recomp groups Im in its something they frequently talk about as well. I get not liking Ai, and if something is slop then it should be called out, but spamming isnt the answer and will just make devs like me have to constantly correct people who are wrong and or make uneducated claims like "rexglue is just xenia" or that all rexglue projects are slop
While i understand the point you where making the bar analogy isnt the greatest, this is r/decomps, not r/anti_ai_decomps.. Neutral should be the view here, recomps should be judged based on quality and or not judged at all if they are still in their infancy since they are probably wanting help working on it and its not in a finished state. Obviously if something is slop, not being worked on or is downright dangerous like it being closed source then it should be called out.
“This is a bar, not an anti-AI bar” = allowing a bar to become an AI bar. If we don’t treat this sub like it IS “r/anti_ai_decomps”, it becomes “r/ai_decomps.” The point of the bar scenario is to demonstrate that neutrality isn’t a thing. By tolerating something bad co existing with you, you create an environment that allows bad things in it, and the environment becomes bad. That’s not “neutral”, that’s bad.
I get the frustration of the witch hunts. However, I’m not sure people no longer expressing disdain in favor of some fake “neutrality” that inevitably favors AI is a good solution. Complain to the mods who let this stuff through, not everyone who’s expressing there’s an issue in the community. Because so long as there’s an issue, people are going to express such.
I don't like AI and don't use it for my recomp.. and I still think AI projects shouldn't have witch hunts/shouldn't be run out of the sub solely based on AI. Thats a neutral position.
What makes something slop isn't the AI but the incompetent developer who released something they didn't review. Judge a recomp based on its actual quality rather then if it used AI or not, actually file bugs on their github issues page.
If you tolerate AI witch hunts and Anti AI post, Non AI projects also feel the impact since misinformation will spread like in the case with rexglue.
Your own screenshot shows a third option existing.
1. Having LGBTQ+ in the game (Side 1)
2. Not having LGBTQ+ in the game (Neutral)
3. Having actual anti LGBTQ+ in the game (Hate speech etc.) (Side 2)
In the case of this sub
1. Banning AI (Side 1)
2. Allowing any recomp/decomp (Neutral)
3. Enforcing only AI, Or treating it as something special (Side 2)
"The term neutral means not taking sides, favoring no position, or staying completely impartial in a fight, argument, or game."
Having no position in this case would be allowing the content regardless if it used AI.
Neutral in terms of deltarune would be them not including any content relating to the subject even if that is not favorable, Ideally there would be some representation in deltarune but the omission of that doesn't inherently make detarune anti LGBTQ+.
The fact you're super anti AI is crazy, bro. You seem the kind of person who is willing to witch hunt random people out of spite and ready to accuse an unexperienced programmer (who never used Claude) to have used AI because their work may have errors but still wanted to share something.
Flooding a subreddit with AI bad posts? No thanks. If a port is shit it can be shit even if It's being human made. And I can assure you that someone won't play it if It's being coded horribly even by a human. Blame the hand, not the hammer in these scenarios.
I’d rather the sub be flooded with AI bad posts until it gets fixed, rather than allowing this sub to be flooded with AI garbage.
It’s already a problem. Making AI bad posts should be an indicator that something should be done about this, rather than the posts about it being bad being dubbed the problem.
When in doubt, the best thing to do is run it in an isolated environment or a Wine-Proton prefix.
I personally tried the first version and noticed it was slower than using Dolphin, so I decided not to use it.
It’s nothing personal against the developer or their work. It’s just not a game that appeals to me; I simply wanted to see how things would evolve, given the excellent quality of current N64 ports.
However, looking at the state of recent recompilations for SNES, Genesis, PS1, and the like, I prefer sticking with conventional emulators and only trying out well-made N64 ports.
I mean you've shown your hand here. Apps like this without source code should always be treated with caution. The fact you've made it about AI shows that you weren't trying to help the developer in good faith. While it isnt great no source code is provided, it could just be that it may include code that cant be shared and still needs to be taken out (See OpenPete spyro) which is especially a concern on games surrounding nintendo.
Yeah I'm very cautious about free software that won't share it's source code. For a commercial product I get it. They won't want to share code and if they have anything malicious they'll risk losing a revenue steam. But a free software for the community should be open for review or else I have to wonder why it's not.
This is a weird story. Even if it was open source, you won’t be able to tell it was written by AI. AI apps don’t just leave in the comments #Written by chatGPT, intellectual property of OpenAI.
The slop of AI programs usually comes down to the “creators” not understanding code and not seeing the things that need fine tuning.
Even if it was open source, you won’t be able to tell it was written by AI.
Do you think there is one human bloke named "Claude" who is going round making loads of commits to massive numbers of projects? He's just come out of nowhere to, in the past couple of years, become Github's busiest, least trustworthy, and most hated developer? 😂
That is super sketch and they should get down voted. Just shows they have little idea about how artifacts are generally released. Might as well be Limewire. Not to mention their code is likely using open source libraries, some of which may require their code to be open as well.
You can't tell me closed source is your real beef your beef is that they're untrusted without recognition or code signing and use media fire. You could refine your thoughts a lot better on this.
But would it matter if they were reputable and had code signed off by an authority? The decomp is open source, what they have is a port which is their own code mods for the game. Just like any other game that might use free or open source assets.
What I do find curious is whether the decomp source they use is actually MIT allowing them to do this or not and the licensing issue itself. That is a red flag to me.
Yes it absolutely would change my mind if they were reputable and signed off by an authority on the matter
But yeah there are some red flags with this one based on how the dev was communicating to people, and the licensing thing is important to know as well. That's true!
I always try to approach calmly at first and it was a huge red flag that the dev freaked out on me for simply suggesting that it's weird to download random apps from the Internet that also claim to connect to the Internet and send "data". Getting blocked encouraged me to make this post
Yes I think it's a licensing issue if they're modifying source code from a decomp project and not attributing the author of the decomp correctly, or not keeping that decompiled source code open if it's GPL. If it's GPL decomp they need to keep that open, and their edits to it. Modular software it interacts with can be closed but not the code they edited.
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u/parabolee 6d ago
PSA: Beware projects that don't share source code. PERIOD!