Now That The Shoe Is On The Other Foot, Microsoft And Epic Games Suddenly Agree That AI Is Theft
The past four weeks have been something of a wake-up call for the video game industry. You’ve read the headlines, so you know the deal by now: AI advancements spearheaded by Claude Opus 5.5 have turned the world of coding on its axis. Decompilations that used to take months, or even years, are now being pumped out on a daily basis, and publishers can’t keep up with the deluge of vibe-coded browser ports and “native” PC recompilations.
I’ve been covering and researching this over the past month, and there’s one recurring topic that keeps popping up in every comment section I read: karma. For many, this is the video game industry’s “you reap what you sow” moment, proof that the AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword.
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So... this story actually gets funnier.
Yes that's right, Teeny Weeny Tim Sweeny showed up in the replies to personally immediately destroy any potential good will this story could possibly have generated for him and Epic.
Keep swingin' Tim.
One of these days, we'll be able to get rid of the tee ball stand... one of these days...
finally found the status/2114913470017860071
he is getting grilled by his hypocrisy
there were more, but he’s deleting his responses live
Let them fight
Epic will simply pay Anthropic a "sabotage your LLM to refuse to undermine our products" fee and then they'll pass the costs onto their users.
The only useful LLM (and I recognise that that word is doing a lot of heavy lifting) is one that you own and control. Everything else is just letting some techbro limit what you can do.
Seize the means of (token) production!
A good reason to run local.
Not letting people do things is a great way to dissuade customers from using your hyperscaler service. Except we don't want anyone using AI to make slop that denigrates others or involves information hazards.
That might be why Musk and Zuckerberg say don't in their ToS but yhen let you do it anyway; tokens are tokens are profit.
But local brew will even do those things anyway.
This is why they want the “AI revolution” to make computing too expensive for anyone but them. It’s about way more than control of copyright, more than seizing the means of production for themselves: they want to be able to control narratives, censor the press (established journalism and independent blog/forum posting and socials), and monitor individuals and groups that may oppose them or present dissenting viewpoints. They want summaries they can control, they want one click censorship, and they want us to rent the privilege from them, creating a permanent information-peasant class. They want insider information on markets, they want to know voter sentiment, they want to sway investors and politics to their whims via system prompts.
We already saw Elon try it (with hillariously bad results) when Grok wouldn’t shut up about “white genocide” in South Africa. Elon is just such a spectacular failson grifter that his plan had no nuance and was plainly obvious.
But now we know for sure.
they want an economic moat. otherwise there's very little additional value over the open weight models which are catching up fast.
Why would they want to rexouoe their losses? They haven't yet.
Protections for me, not for thee
Hasn't there already been precedent that copyright doesn't cover AI generated works? So how to these companies plan on legally selling their games, when it's actually legal to just copy and share them?
Technically speaking, a cleanroom reverse-engineered program isn’t illegal (this is how IBM PC clones were allowed to exist), at least in the US.
On the other hand, since AI cannot hold a copyright, the prompters cannot sue if, say, Sony or Microsoft just take their code and sell it.
Most decompiled games need a copy of the original game for assets (graphics, textures, etc) since those wouldn’t be recreated via AI, and shipping with them would be copyright infringement.
no im talking about the reverse, of microsoft using ai to make their new games. further in the article.
Trademark
You will own nothing and be happy, megacorporations.
Well I own no Microsoft or epic products and I am happy, so it seems to be working.
This is TERRIBLE! RICH PEOPLE owned those Assests being Stolen! WHY couldn't it JUST be POOR People being Stolen from?
-The US Government!
Can we point robots as Let’s Play videos and ask them to recreate the games being played yet?
I’d imagine that the context window you’d need to perform such a feat would be so large that it would be impossible, even with all the compute we are currently throwing at AI models. It would at best be financially impractical.
I was pretty curious as to how the mega corporations would react to ai being able to "clone" their paid products, especially because all they want is to prevent ai from being regulated
I really don't know how to feel about this, to be honest. I'm definitely not on the corporate side but I also just don't like vibe coding/generative ai. At the same time I think the ports are pretty interesting (alongside the game in another game things, like Minecraft in GTA 5)