Honestly my main issue is that this gives more power to the corporations who can steal any content and then sell it as a subscription.
Even local generative AI is ethically sus, but as an occasional pirate I don’t have any moral high ground. I don’t really mind as long as its user in a way that doesn’t harm the jobs of the artists (which it often does).
Quality wise, realistic images are often sloppy but I too am starting to fail to notice sometimes, which doesn’t feel good if it’s something that can misinform me. Recently I played for some hours with an anime based model, and I have no chance telling what is real there. But it still really drew home the fact that it lacks some of the artistic expression. No matter how much you write in the prompt you can’t control all the details with intent like the artist does, and you’re at the mercy of the model on anything that you leave to interpretation. And if the model doesn’t have enough data on what you want it will just break down. So it only works as long as you have a relatively vague idea and don’t care about the specifics. Which is why I also think it can’t replace anyone as long as the audience cares about intent being there and being consistent (which again often they don’t care).
Anyway, I consider these models to basically be creating interpolations of existing art now.





this one? Settings -> Tabs, set to list
Basically yes, you find which values in memory are changing when you do actions ingame, and you can also figure out which functions run etc. Then you can for example replace the function call with your own function. I can’t do this myself and it is very time consuming, you can watch tutorials on IDA or Ghidra to get a gist.
To be more exact, usually games additional dlls, and they will first try to load ones from the same folder as the exe, so you can modify or add a dll and whrn the game calls it make the modifications you need. So no need for a secondary process that monitors the game, but it is kind of hacking the game.
But often it is not that hard, c# or java dont get compiled into machine code and usually keep more metadata about the code, sometimes basically the original source code. Unity, Godot and UE all have some level of support (or reverse engined knowledge) for modding even if the game iteelf doesnt explicitly care about it. Of course it is much easier is the game is made with modding in mind though.