i find it incredibly distressing and hypocritical when people only call ai generated images slop, but proceed to be okay with vibe coding or writing, or even the other way around. these are ALL fields with passionate and clever ppl in them, people who have dedicated years of their time learning something they care about so they can express or explore themselves in new ways.

just because one is perceived as easy/novel doesn't take away from the human touch, or the emotions or accomplishment. whether it's reducible to an algorithm or eventually becomes machine-replicable, whether "anyone can do it now!", that shouldn't let us devalue these people and their work.

i go outside and i see horrifically nodulated computer-generated fried chicken advertisements plastered over a business's windows and i think to myself, "i wish someone put time and effort into cooking real food and taking a photo of it". it makes me sad to see the chef erased, to know the photographer is going hungry and know the graphic designer wasn't able to do what they enjoy.

i go online and i hear about some really cool video game mods made by combining two different games together, apparently some of them even have multiplayer. awesome!

something feels off though.. why have i never heard about this until recently?

i sleep on it....

a few days later, i hear about these mods again. i go online and i see elden ring with minecraft players running around. i see spider-man swinging around in arkham city. the comments are joyous and excited, modding is changed forever! i'm even getting a bit giddy, thinking about the possibilities. what if you could take elements from different games, decompile their source code and port them over, imagine how fun that could be, like garry's mod but real.

i look back at spider-man and continue watching the gameplay. i notice his legs dangling in front of the subtitles for a split second. what. what? oh...

clever compositing. smoke and mirrors. both games are running at the same time, overlaying each other. one game is controlling the camera, the other decides how collisions are mocked. one of the games is entirely transparent except for the player model so you can see through to the other game.

i haven't been able to find a single verifiable claim of decompilation. there's dozens of computer-written scientific papers out there, all referencing one another. mostly fraudulent research journals. there's hundreds of mods with vibe coded github repositories containing terribly messy programming, but it's all compositing tricks. thousands of lines of shallow code.

if anyone knows of an actual game decompilation using LLMs that can be verified or replicated, proof that the compiled bytecode matches somehow and has been modded into another game, i would love to see it. i don't think i will ever see it though. i doubt it exists.

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i'm struggling to see a hopeful future.

i've been trying to come to terms with my identity and where i fit into it all. seeing my passions slowly subsumed into the machine flesh, taken away from me and churned out a billion-fold has made it difficult to find joy in these things anymore.

i still value human work. i refuse to settle for synthesis even if i can't always tell whether something is synthesized or not. no amount of trickery will take away how important people are to me, and how important it is that people are given the opportunity to master their crafts and use them.

the programmer and the graphic designer are experiencing the same thing right now, both being told they're worthless because a machine can convince anyone it's just as good. i've heard so many people debase themselves and doubt their own abilities, "why even bother if a machine can do it better than me?"

i promise you it can't.

anything you make will be better, because *you* made it. please never let anyone take that away from you.