My how fast the AI tech bros move to protect corporations but don’t move to protect the average coder, artists, writers.
“It’s so powerful! You’re only allowed to use it how we want you to”.
Allowed eh? How about go fuck yourself?
Hot take:
This is a good thing.
Claude Code is the “lowest common denominator.” It’s the default, zero research option. Its where you go if you follow popular trends.
If you actually want to reverse engineer, help code a game or something, there are hundreds of capable, uncensored LLM APIs to do that. Hacker communities will eventually figure that out, and finally realize Claude isn’t unique, and that Anthropic is toxic.
But for lazy spammers who don’t know that and aren’t motivated to seek stuff out… well, if this makes their life more difficult, good. If this sabotages Anthropic, that’s good too.
Misanthropic: Characterized by a hatred or mistrustful scorn for humankind.
To those who say “but what about game preservation?”:
GenAI slop ruined communities around game preservation. And for every time a AAA dev getting this treatment, there’s at least 3 indies getting it worse.
Yep a lot of decomps just get a slop coded version and people stop caring about it because the slop version is “good enough.” Most people doing the decomps it’s also a hobby project that they’re doing for fun as well, the end goal is just a bonus.
There’s already a meme that a lot of those decomps are just emulators + ROMs in a single repository.
Another reason not to use a closed models
Is this in response to that new “reverse engineer anything” tool from the people that reverse engineered the Adobe suite?
The adobe suite was not reverse engineered, in the sense in which the term is applied to binary, closed-source softeware. Rather, it was cloned.
This is technically and often also legally very different. Cloning is a new implementation of a system which reproduces the abstract API of an existing System. Since APIs are not subject to copyright law, this is legally unproblemaric. It is also a creative process (so far). For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Reverse engineering uses techniques like analysing the internal behaviour and decompiling the binary code of an existing product. It is im general not illegal, but it can violate license agreements and is more in a grey area. Laws like the DMCA might also apply if some kind of copy protection is used.
BTW, many Linux drivers are reverse enginnered to some degree.
For exsmple, Linux is a clone of AT & T Unix.
Unless your definition of “clone” is very different from the mainstream one, you’re talking out of your ass here. Linux was written from scratch. The only thing they’ve got in common is being POSIX-compliant.
of course. anyone who thinks AI can be used as a tool for independence is deluding themselves
anyone who thinks AI can be used by us commoners for much longer is deluding themselves. it is so obvious that these big LLM companies want to capture the market by making everyone dependent and then crank prices way up.
I’m hopeful this is positive, they’ll start loosing a lot more to Chinese models and I can assure you local models will blow up too.
I can assure you local models will blow up too.
Why?
They are really good already, even if they have some kind of censored limitation, once you jailbreak it js jailed break for ever The only limitation right now is the poribitive gpu prices
Don’t worry! Its STILL okay to reverse engineer the work of photographers artists writers actors voice over musicians modelers animators academics etc etc (feel free to add. the exploitation is literally everywhere!)
Only if you’re a corporation! If you’re a filthy worker then you have no rights.
Jokes on them when they face the consequences of usurping the jobs of all these professions, causing mass exit, and replacing with their error prone output of their slop and unoriginal thinking/artistry. I’m excited to see this outcome, not going to lie.
So this is how these companies are going to safeguard against IP theft lawsuits! Leave our theft be, or we’ll tell everyone how to get in.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering. A tool that values the captial holders through & through. Their “democratization of intelligence” schtick is obvious now.
OpenSource frontier models ASAP! Obviously never gonna happen, but a fool can dream atleast.
Also it’s incredibly telling how Anthropic doesn’t add code to stop suicide ideation in teens (what they are their ilk are being sued for) but can somehow very quickly stop reverse engineering.
This.
It’s not ok when the commoners get some power back huh. What a shame, I’ve been loving playing my favorite console fps games as a kid, now with keyboard and mouse support.
More power and value to the open weight models, cool
The task Large Language Models are best at is pattern correlation. Out of all the possible applications, reverse-engineering seems the most reasonable use case to me.
But figuring out how stuff works is the exact opposite of what they want vibe coders to do: Don’t think, don’t train your own skills, just trust the machine. And if it doesn’t work, just prompt again and keep wasting more tokens, pushing the usage metrics to convince investors they’re constantly growing, burning the planet and your company’s money.
Man, the one thing I was interested in, the decompiling of abandoned software to get old games and software back, is being limited.
When it hurts jobs, AI is the future, when it hurts rich friends needs moderation.
This was literally destroying indie games. Look at the deluge of slop that came out when ‘sort items onto shelves’ kicked off as a game type.
I can’t understand why anyone would play such a “game”. You’ll get more satisfaction and results from actually tidying your room!
It’s interesting to see modern day “shovelware” is still around. The problem of shitty clones and rip offs of popular games has always been around. Or the classic bait and switch of advertising vs actual gameplay.
The proliferation of these things made possible through the internet and sites like itch.io and sped up by lazy AI slop has certainly made it even more pronounced. The difficulty of finding good indie games amongst a huge pile of trash has only grown.
That’s what late stage capitalism mixed with desperation, delusion, and the desire to get rich quick will get you though.
Indies have been copied since Unity introduced the asset store, don’t fool yourself, this is made to stop the reverse engineering of big company games and apps, not the little guy.
Now only the people that have enough money to pay for the privilege get to use it!!! Hurray?
That was always the plan
It’s like watching the Nazi party ban the rape of Jewish women in 1944
