As I am sure you are aware, the use of AI tools has exploded in 2026.
In the retro computing area, people are using it a lot to create code for software, make utilities, drivers, music, graphics and videos too.
It means that whole applications, games, drivers and graphics are being created with AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Suno, and many more tools.
For example, here is a game I downloaded this week to try on my Amiga 1200 system, called Sparkpaw: The Stormstone quest.
I have my own opinions about the use of AI tools in creative fields, and I know it is a very passionate topic to discuss for the retro computing community also. I respect your right to your opinions - please respect my right to my opinions. Your opinion is as valid as mine.
The other day I heard a song while playing Trackmania 2 Canyon online which I quite liked, and hadn't heard before. I found out the title and bought the song, which is called "Clock out" by MN Beats.
You can listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaz6sP3Juak
Later on I discovered the whole song had been written by an AI tool called Suno.
Not a single note in the song has been created by a person directly - they used AI tools to do everything. Every instrument and voice is AI generated. Reading their Facebook page, they refer to it as "getting AI to do the heavy lifting in the creative process"...
I have always written my own music without AI.
So, I am still not sure how I should feel about this. On the one side I feel anger that people "cut corners" on learning music theory and how to play musical instruments or produce music to commercial quality. I feel that they are "cheating" and not respecting the hard work of those who came before by doing the hard work to understand how to make great music.
At the same time, I appreciate (from my own experience using AI tools to create things for company use) that there is a lot of work to create the required prompts to make a seamlessly good sounding song using an AI tool. The work is not the same as genuine music creation however. I don't think I can treat the "artist" responsible for releasing a fully AI-generated song or software as an "artist" or "author". Do you?
The "talent" to create the right prompts in an AI tool (in order to create music people want to buy) is a hard one for me to feel good about, as a person who also writes their own music without such tools. Prompt engineering is a thing, and being good at it is the key to using AI tools effectively.
I like the song, but the fact that the whole song was created in full with an AI tool and not a real person doesn't sit well with me. I suspect many genuine musicians feel the same way. I am a strong supporter of musicians who create great music that I like.
Take a listen to the song I linked above yourself and be honest with yourself - can you tell it was AI generated if I didn't tell you it was? I was fooled, and I like to think I can pick it - the same for AI generated graphics or videos. They are only getting better and harder to tell apart.
A developer explained AI tool use for code development to me like this recently. "If you have two ways to cross a city to get to your destination, an express train that you just get on, ride and it crosses it in 30 minutes straight to your destination with little effort, or walking across the city for the full day, which would you choose?"
Perhaps it is easier for some tasks, but AI tool use is clearly gutting the software development community, especially for games. Plenty of examples, like Australian Candy crush developer King apparently laying off 200 staff and replaced with AI. Electronic Arts being bought out recently with talk of AI first strategy to bring more profits. Ah, the magic word. I imagine the 20,000 staff folks let go at Microsoft, Meta and at Bioware in 2026 would not speak well of the AI tool use in development...
For the demoscene, AI use is generally viewed very negatively by that community, and for good reason. It goes against the very spirit of the demoscene itself. Where is the next generation of coders and developers going to come from?
Will games produced by different versions of Claude need to be categorised by version to be able to work out how well the AI generated result is? Will we have retro meetings where people demonstrate prompts and skills used to make demos and games produced under Claude sonnet versus whatever the latest build is in the future? Will Retro versions of AI generated content be interesting to anyone?
Will anyone care about preserving fully AI generated games and software? Who gets the credit and copyright for authoring it? Is it owned by Claude, ChatGPT or the person/company who provided the prompt to make it? Who has the right to sell products fully generated by AI tools? If I generated an exact copy of a game, application or demo you generated with an AI tool fully, and sell it alongside, is that ok with you as the original "author"? Can you sue me for doing that?
This AI tool use is reflected in a real reduction of people wanting to enter IT or creative fields in the first place - people are scared their job will be replaced by AI. Why would anyone do an IT degree in 2026 beyond engineering, cybersecurity and AI focused areas? You would have to be mad to do software development - the future is uncertain as hell, with so many companies shedding software development staff left, right, and centre.
On the positive side of the AI tools use in retro computing in 2026, we are seeing an explosion in new software being released, both newly created software, and ports of applications and games that have never been ported to the platform before.
The complexity of porting such software and lack of suitably knowledgable developers was the reason for the lack of ports of this software in the past, but thanks to AI tools we are now seeing this software being released!
A great example of this in recent times is Sonic the Hedgehog 2, is now available to play on your Amiga 1200! I never thought that would ever happen, and yet this week I was playing the full game at full speed on my Amiga 1200. They said it couldn't be done and yet here it is:
For CSDb, as below, most of the AI tool use is because of AI made games released on it (71%).
I find it scary as a demoscene member, that the number of demos and intros with AI tool use on the C64 is not zero... that said it is only 8% of the titles released in 2026.
Anyway, my intention with showing this data was just because I was curious how AI tools are actually being used in the retro computing community in 2026, specifically on the Amiga and C64.
I hope this has been interesting and an eye-opener, as it definitely was for me.
On the subject of eye-openers, I also found out (while I was researching for this blog post) that my own blog contents from 2012 to 2026 has already been downloaded in full (as it is publicly available data) and that data taken by the generative AI tools on the internet - I confirmed all my posts and images are now potentially used to enrich generative AI tools responses without my permission.
I am beyond angry that this is even allowed.
Looking into it further in the past week or so, Common crawl (ccbot) is just one example of this activity. I had no idea this was happening - apparently my copyright material is fair game as it is publicly available and not behind a paywall. Even if it is behind a paywall it seems that is no guarantee either.
As a result, I have excluded AI generative bots from my website (as much as blogger allows anyway), inserted copyright and no generative AI use notices into my website, including watermarking all future blog post images (no point with the old ones since the data has already been captured). Please respect my copyright over my blog text and images and ask for permission before using them.
If you own a blog or have a website with publicly visible content, be aware that not for profit companies have already collected all your text, videos and images, packaging it for "internet preservation", and their activities are partly funded by the AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
That data is then being taken by generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to enhance their agent responses for anyone using their tools. So someone can then generate similar content using your copyright material as a base! This is a scary time to be a content creator who actually creates non-AI generated content and sell it...eg, a book author. Anyway, I digress a little.
As I said, my feelings on AI tools use are mixed and conflicted - you can see why now.
I am sure many people have no such problem with using the AI tools - indeed, that is pretty clear from the output of new software for Amiga and C64 in 2026. I expect people will try more and more ambitious and larger projects using AI tools in the future, and I hope these are used to improve the quality of software for our platforms, rather than dumping a huge steaming pile of AI slop that doesn't work right, and further removing the motivation for traditional developers to bother making software anymore..I hope to see an AI-generated ports of Libreoffice, Firefox or Thunderbird, modern graphic card support drivers for AmigaOS 4, MorphOS and AROS soon!
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