[Discussion] Use of AI/LLM in the retro community

[KennyPowers]

As usual, the law fails to keep up with the tech. I personally feel the Copyright law Fair Use provisions were never intended to be used this way. It’s an abuse. However, as usual, corporations win out over individuals, and the law is applied unfairly. Ask yourself why Anthropic didn’t have to pay the penalties kids sharing music files did? They got a slap on the wrist in comparison.

One *could* argue that the way Anthropic used training materials is more analogous to a budding professional musician learning from, and being influenced by music they heard on the radio to develop their own "product"...arguably different than openly redistributing copyrighted material as-is. It's definitely uncharted territory though.

Of course you're right that things like fair-use provisions and software/content licensing never saw these models coming, and the inertia behind them means that future laws/rulings are unlikely to significantly roll them back. It's also a certainty that the creators of much of what ended up being training materials never intended for their works to be used that way.

So ya...ethically questionable origins? Yes. Useful when used responsibly? Also yes. Potentially harmful when used irresponsibly? Of course.

 

[jmacz]

You are going to have a wide range of opinions, and that’s normal and OK.

I appreciate photographs developed by the photographer from negatives. But I also appreciate correcting in Photoshop. And I also like the ability to generate what I want with AI. I like being able correct the one family member whose bare feet was showing not because I want a 100% correct untouched photo but because their feet showing was embarrassing to them and took away from the goal of that family photo.

I like watches. Mechanical because I appreciate the mechanism or how some are hand crafted. But I also wear a Casio because I appreciate it for what it is. Or my Apple Watch. Or just using my phone.

I enjoy creating things with a mill and lathe. But I also like simplifying fast projects with a CNC. And rapid prototyping with a 3D printer.

I use Claude Code. I also still hand craft 68K assembly. One for getting something done with minimal effort. One to enjoy the experience.

I know some like to argue that using AI means you lack understanding of the fundamentals. But then do most programmers these days understand things at the machine instruction level, or chip level, or everything underneath that allows them to code using a higher level language. If we had a major extinction level event, how many folks know how to reestablish the power grid, even telephones, let alone mobile phones and world wide internet? We take things for granted so the argument that you don’t understand the underpinnings only goes so far.

But I do think we are bound for some societal problems. Software engineering as a career is already heavily impacted by what we have created. And that’s not new. Has happened all the time, even during public cloud adoption, or the dotcom era.

But my biggest concern is no longer being able to believe what we hear or see. Audio proof wasn’t enough years ago and now video proof is also not enough. How does society change when you now must see it with your own eyes to believe it?

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Appreciate everyone’s thoughts.

How about some thoughts on the potential harms specifically from using AI to make or help with _retro_ tech projects? Lots of good talk on general AI risks (art) or in modern application (i.e. not retro tech) and indirect stuff as well (hardware price impact due to AI that leads to price changes in retro tech related hardware) — but what about within retro tech directly?

 

[jeffburg]

Thanks for starting this thread. I think everyone has really great points. I will throw my personal opinion into the ring as a software developer, I like retro tech because its fun and I like making my old tech do things no one would have expected it could do, or at least it can no longer do due to the arbitrary technical blockers or lack of interest from big tech in continuing to support old tech.

So I think for modern production systems the discussion around should we use AI is extremely important because for a modern product, you have customers, you have legal and IP, and you have development cost to consider. But for retro-tech, we don't have those concerns. And I think I saw my opinion reinforced by @MacOfAllTrades back porting DOOM to a Mac SE:

I think AI will be a huge boon to retro tech enthusiasts... and I can elaborate why:

One of the main reasons supporting / developing on old platforms is a pain in the butt, is because newer platforms haver nicer API's, more built in features, and the languages have more syntactic sugar that makes, you the human, spend less time dealing with trivial computer things like memory management and IO and stuff.

With AI, now all of that stuff is a lot less important. The AI will happily do memory management, and other tedious tasks for you. It will help you back port your favorite software for your modern computer to your favorite retro computer. Need to integrate libcurl into your app, so that your app can do modern networking on an old computer? No problem, Gemini did that for me.

So in our world, where we do not sell software, we do not really have customers, and we work for free... AI is an absolute godsend with almost no downsides (data center energy usage aside) So, I realize this is a biased opinion because I literally released my own AI tool in the Software Development forum here yesterday. But I am super excited.

But as with all things, if people decide they don't want to use it because its not their preference or they object to it morally or ethically, I also totally understand that and I would not force someone to use it.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

But as with all things, if people decide they don't want to use it because its not their preference or they object to it morally or ethically, I also totally understand that and I would not force someone to use it.

I like this a lot. I think it speaks to the freedom of choice which is very important. As creative & thoughtful people, we fortunately have the choice to use it or not. I can absolutely envision a subculture of sorts that is AI free - everything is done by a human ... which is awesome. Its advertised, spoken to, worn as a badge of honor and culturally important to that group of people. Like web v1 folks or buy American made folks, it's great to have that ability to express your ideological ethos in action - where the rubber hits the road. As spoken to earlier, where a product and profit motive is involved or where key security infrastructure is involved, its can get murky and quite granular where broader brushes would fail, but for us, it can in many ways boil down simply to choice as an expression of our personal ethos.

 

[MacOfAllTrades]

Woz on AI. . Not retro tech but an older tech legend commenting on AI today (tldr he’s not impressed)

 

[wottle]

Woz on AI. . Not retro tech but an older tech legend commenting on AI today (tldr he’s not impressed)

I posted recently about my inventory management system which I re-wrote in a pretty short time, heavily with the help of Claude Code. I would not have had the time to produce what I did because it would have taken me months to years of all my free time to produce what I did. But it seems like a low stakes system. No one is dying if a bug appears in their inventory tracking system. But I also have added some AI features into the app because I don't specifically object for its use to try to meet our needs. I am a bit OCD about my device collections thumbnails. So I added a feature to create consistent, professional looking thumbnails for my devices. A really cool example of this is the custom PowerMac G5 bench. I don't have a photo studio with lighting and backgrounds. But I was able to make my photo of the bench, and make it into a nice thumbnail for my app.

So it took this:



and gave me this:



And I know just the fact that my app has an optional feature that allows you to use AI will cause some in the community to not use it. And I'm fine with that. If you. don't want a system that includes AI features or was built with the help of AI, that's certainly your choice. Anyone can make their own. I'm going to open source it when I clean it up and if someone wants to build a better version of my app with their own choices for features, I love that. I think more options is better for the community.

I do think we need to be careful about its use. There have been many occasions where Claude would change code in ways I did not think was ideal. If I hadn't spent 25+ years in software development, the product would have suffered. And I'm sure there are many things in my app that could be improved. But it's there. IT's doing what I need. Could it scale to be a SaaS solution for the whole community? Not in its current form. But I agree with others that it is enabling many of us to tackle projects we put off in the past due to lack to experience, lack of time, etc. We just need to learn to use it as a tool without learning the knowledge and expertise it was trained on.

 

[jeffburg]

@wottle this is amazing! I really want to see the project after you open it up on GitHub. And yeah, these are exactly my findings as well. I don't want to discourage non-software developers from doing vibe coding. But do know, that in the current state of the AI technology, it does need a lot of guidance to get to a good, maintainable solution. It's still a lot less work than doing it manually. But you essentially become a professional code reviewer and architect rather than a developer. So having that software dev background is very very helpful, even if it's just in a different language or domain it will still help. I think the AI tech will get better and it will need less guidance. But for now, its almost required.

All that said, I still think absolute beginners should try it. Again, for low criticality apps only. You might make your retro device a lot more usable for yourself.

 

[thecloud]

Most of the people I hear saying "it's just a tool and it helps me be more productive" are already proficient software developers. What worries me is that the tool will be increasingly relied on by folks who are not yet proficient, and/or whose only motivation is to get to the end of the development process as quickly as possible. When that happens, skills will be lost, or never acquired. Personally, I'm convinced that you only acquire development skills by writing the code yourself, figuring out how it works by trying until you succeed, and learning from that experience so you can build a solid foundation.

I am definitely in agreement with what @XodiumLabs wrote in an earlier post in this thread. LLMs are part of the modern tech trend that would like to move everything to a subscription-based model (how many tokens did you spend today?), controlling what you can do with your own machines and data. The retro tech world reminds me of the time when these machines could let you create whatever you dreamed of, rather than only what Big Tech permits you to do, in a sandbox, for a recurring fee.

 

[KennyPowers]

Most of the people I hear saying "it's just a tool and it helps me be more productive" are already proficient software developers. What worries me is that the tool will be increasingly relied on by folks who are not yet proficient, and/or whose only motivation is to get to the end of the development process as quickly as possible. When that happens, skills will be lost, or never acquired. Personally, I'm convinced that you only acquire development skills by writing the code yourself, figuring out how it works by trying until you succeed, and learning from that experience so you can build a solid foundation.

I am definitely in agreement with what @XodiumLabs wrote in an earlier post in this thread. LLMs are part of the modern tech trend that would like to move everything to a subscription-based model (how many tokens did you spend today?), controlling what you can do with your own machines and data. The retro tech world reminds me of the time when these machines could let you create whatever you dreamed of, rather than only what Big Tech permits you to do, in a sandbox, for a recurring fee.

I definitely agree with the sentiment of the second part. Every new tool that lets you work at a higher level of abstraction slowly leads to collective skill loss and eventually redefines a "solid foundation" though, and not just in the domain of software development.

 

[XodiumLabs]

Given the fun announcement this morning that Sony is drastically increasing PS5 prices due to what I’m assuming is the RAM/SSD shortage, I also think some more focus needs to be placed on the impact of AI, too. Like it isn’t just bad enough to *use* Big AI, but now it’s consuming the entire computing industry as it feels like it’s transforming into this black hole.

It’s like when all the crypto dorks bought up the GPUs but 10000x worse. They’re not even leaving table scraps for the rest of us, even hard drives are going up in price. Spinning. Friggin. Media. It’s to the point where I want to shut down my server/NAS because I literally can’t afford to replace a drive if a lose one right now.

And as I’ve said before this has other effects, like I can’t afford SSDs for retro projects anymore. They’re too expensive.

Which is why there has to be some focus placed on, well, using Big AI enabling this to happen further. On top of that, given how it’s turning into this all-consuming black hole I’m really feeling a certain way about letting it into the retro scene now more than ever.

 

[Arbystpossum]

Given the fun announcement this morning that Sony is drastically increasing PS5 prices due to what I’m assuming is the RAM/SSD shortage, I also think some more focus needs to be placed on the impact of AI, too. Like it isn’t just bad enough to *use* Big AI, but now it’s consuming the entire computing industry as it feels like it’s transforming into this black hole.

It’s like when all the crypto dorks bought up the GPUs but 10000x worse. They’re not even leaving table scraps for the rest of us, even hard drives are going up in price. Spinning. Friggin. Media. It’s to the point where I want to shut down my server/NAS because I literally can’t afford to replace a drive if a lose one right now.

And as I’ve said before this has other effects, like I can’t afford SSDs for retro projects anymore. They’re too expensive.

Which is why there has to be some focus placed on, well, using Big AI enabling this to happen further. On top of that, given how it’s turning into this all-consuming black hole I’m really feeling a certain way about letting it into the retro scene now more than ever.

I've been wanting to upgrade my computer for almost 3 years now. Money issues and rising prices have made this a non-option as of late. I even have my case picked out and have been sitting on it for years, a Silverstone FLP01. I can't even move the current guts from one case to the other, due to a heatsink height issue.

AI needs to move away from these server monolith super models, and to something local that can run on a single machine.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Most of the people I hear saying "it's just a tool and it helps me be more productive" are already proficient software developers. What worries me is that the tool will be increasingly relied on by folks who are not yet proficient, and/or whose only motivation is to get to the end of the development process as quickly as possible. When that happens, skills will be lost, or never acquired. Personally, I'm convinced that you only acquire development skills by writing the code yourself, figuring out how it works by trying until you succeed, and learning from that experience so you can build a solid foundation.

I am definitely in agreement with what @XodiumLabs wrote in an earlier post in this thread. LLMs are part of the modern tech trend that would like to move everything to a subscription-based model (how many tokens did you spend today?), controlling what you can do with your own machines and data. The retro tech world reminds me of the time when these machines could let you create whatever you dreamed of, rather than only what Big Tech permits you to do, in a sandbox, for a recurring fee.

There will always be people who do this. I mean we do this now but with people vs ai agents. A generalist administrator manages a team of specialists to accomplish the task. I understand that the concern is that AI agent wheel house is not there yet in regards to "the specialist" but I think that is not too far off for a number of industries. At some point, the people will be, en masse replaced with agents.

This is the concern I have. Not so much that layman users need to be policed in their use; rather the society encompassing economic disruption this will undoubtedly create when employed in earnest across entire markets, countries & geographic regions etc. The layman's use concern can be solved for pretty readily with a market driven services & verifications model if/when called for.

Does it bug me that SSDs are now $25 vs $17 shipped? Yeah its not nearly as fun at that price point but the long term net gains for communities like this will steadily outpace any short term disruptions like pricing & availability IMO. Like I said earlier, the concerns I have are large scale economic disruption & oversight of critical control points within critical industries, not so much how layman vs profesional users use this emerging technology to get from point A to B on an idea in a retro computing community.

 

[KnobsNSwitches]

I "wrote" a Palm app over the weekend with claude code. I put that in quotes as I was just giving instructions. My C experience is minimal, my Palm dev experience is zero. As a software dev, I've always been interested in retro development, but sitting down to learn something I'm not that experienced in ended up feeling more like work than a hobby, so I've never really done it. (setting up retro dev tools, finding docs, etc... "Palm" doesn't lead to much development info when searching - you get lots of unrelated results, etc)


My mind was blown at how AI was able to easily and rapidly make what I wanted; I'm generally something of a doomer about where this is all going, but this was entertaining. The iterative, compile, put the .prc on an SD card, test on my Tungsten C, ask for changes process is like having a smart intern who needs direct instructions.