Post by @mrmaplebar@fedia.io

2026-10-27 20:06 UTC

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.

Replies (4)

@bowsertattoo@piefed.social 2026-10-27 22:19

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?

Open ##5476369
@danielquinn@lemmy.ca 2026-10-27 22:03

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.

Open ##5477456
@sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-28 00:51

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…

Open ##5479211
@queermunist@lemmy.ml 2026-10-28 13:37

We’re going to find out that AI was trained on stolen source code and isn’t actually reverse engineering anything.

Open ##5485073