I was not expecting AI to be a catalyst to reinvigorate the game modding landscape, but AI tech seems to be filled with unintended consequences. Hopefully these types of processes can be achieved with local hardware running open models in the near future. Micro-scale community compute could completely facilitate a departure from the tech behemoths' walled gardens.

problem is people half ass these things for clout and who knows if the games are even completable

I'm still skeptical that the LLMs are really doing "clean room decompilation." It's plausible that all of the source code for these games is included in the training data. Most of the examples in the article are owned by big publishers who may have made secret source code access deals with the AI companies. In the case of The Binding of Isaac's flash version, the LLM might be trained on the pre-existing decompiled ActionScript.

Nothing with "AI" is awesome.