Comment by matheusmoreira
20 hours ago
> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.
AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.
... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.
LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.
How could the possibly have been trained on the proprietary source code of games made many years ago?
How could they have trained on books that they didn't buy or source from libraries?
I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.
How is Claude going to be trained on GTA5'S game engine source code if it's closed source?
It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.
A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.
Well funny enough, the code for GTA5 did leak not too long ago...
It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.
[flagged]
You make agent A decompile the code and describe the behavior of each function in a spec. Then agent B with no access to the internet or the original code implements it.
This is legally safe because the spec only described interfaces and had no copyrighted code from the original app. APIs are fair use under Google v Oracle and code that accidentally ends up the same falls under merger doctrine.
They can maybe try and get you on patents but that's easy to avoid by doing it in Europe. Trade secrets don't apply because you reverse engineered the code. The only thing left is good old section 1201.
Of course it's different in practice because these companies have huge legal teams and know where the corpo friendly or tech illiterate judges work. But that's a separate question from is it legal or not.
You have an automated pipeline, that includes decompilation. I highly doubt the courts will see the nuance that you apparently do.
The pipeline begins with decompilation. Maybe it doesn't save all that information, but it is part of the pipeline, and so, will be part of the consideration when discovery happens.