Has anyone tried AI with PICBASIC

[rsocor01]

and that is funny thing.
Human can learn from other works and create his art, literature or music based on that - this is fine. But same not fine for AI?

Humans can get sued for plagiarism, patent infringement, etc. AI cannot.

[Ioannis]

But the company that owns the AI can be sued...

Humans can create new content. AI does not have this feature (yet). It only copy pastes fast with millions of options.

Ioannis

[rsocor01]

True. The company that owns the AI can get sued.

I'm not an expert on AI or even close to be one, but I believe that AI can create new content. For example, it can create a new painting, a new book writing, or code if you tell it what to do. I think that graphic designers are one of the professions getting hit the harder by AI.

[Ioannis]

From my experience so far, it creates “new” content based on what it found from entire the available knowledge. It is not new content but a collection of statistical findings.

Sure there is potential and every day it gets better. I do not know where it is now but I am sure it will be able to create distinct and unique content soon.

Ioannis

[richard]

From my experience so far, it creates “new” content based on what it found from entire the available knowledge. It is not new content but a collection of statistical findings.

or just morally bankrupt

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-...e=abc_news_web

first nations people have it bad enough, stealing their artwork is so unnecessary

[CuriousOne]

Not correct comparison.
For example, there is Baroque - style in music, architecture, art. A lot of artists worked in that genre, so this is plagiarism?
Or other movements in arts and literature, like pointillism, impressionism, cubism and so on.

So all what's going on is completely normal and understandable and modern day AI haters can be directly compared to luddites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

[Ioannis]

or just morally bankrupt

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-...e=abc_news_web

first nations people have it bad enough, stealing their artwork is so unnecessary

Absolutely.

from the article:

When we asked the AI to generate the Ngunnawal 'Dreamtime' image, it stated it would "design something in a 'safe zone' of respectful, generic dot-painting symbolism"

on the safe zone, right...

Ioannis

[richard]

Giving untrained, untalented people of little ability a tool to generate product that they can and will pass off as if its from a skilled source can only serve to undermine the value and skillset of the very things they have copied. The only people who shall reap long a term benefit are the sociopaths like Musk, Zuckerberg etc Philistines will rule. Where ultimately would the future value be in learning to Paint, Write, Draw, Program, Compose music, Act, Play a Piano ....?, best just learn a sport [professional of course] nobody will appreciate the 10,000 hours its takes to master any other skill. I'm just off to lie on the sofa and watch the AI generated NEWS and then AI generated football final, I might go outside tomorrow.

[richard]

and tonight footy will be great, Britain's top players of the last 100 years vs cuddly kittens in suits
such skill

[rsocor01]

Giving untrained, untalented people of little ability a tool to generate product that they can and will pass off as if its from a skilled source can only serve to undermine the value and skillset of the very things they have copied.

You nailed it here. I couldn't have explained it better.

[CuriousOne]

Yes indeed, this is how progress and evolution works.
For example, there were centuries, where salt was much expensive in certain areas than gold.
Now salt is generally accessible.
Or such a simple thing, as female stockings. There were times, when hand woven stockings would cost 40-50 cows for a single item.
Now for the price of one cow, most likely you'll be able to buy maybe 5000 sets of stockings, because technology removed expensive hand labor from process.

Same to the "art" - creation of it was prerogative of talented people, now everyone can do it.

Is that bad? depends for who and depends on which viewpoint.

By the way, "Brave new world", and it's continuation especially, very precisely describe the future we're moving into...

[CuriousOne]

I'm using AI to write PBP code for latest months and it has significantly improved - gone syntax issues, like using proton basic or C++ style code in PBP. Also, it no longer invents new types of variables or statements. However, two issues are persistent:

1. Use of reserved words like DATA, LOOP and so on for variable and subroutine names.
2. Code sequencing - subroutines might be placed before the main code, so it will never get to the main code.

But anyways, improvement is significant and noticeable.

[CuriousOne]

Did a simple experiment - took a small midi file and asked major AI systems to create picbasic pro code which will play it using FREQOUT statement.

1. Gemini generated code which compiled straight away, but both notes and their durations were wrong. Several requests and it fixed notes, but durations still were wrong.
2. ChatGPT also generated code which was compiled without errors, but durations there were wrong as in case of Gemini (Pitch was correct), requests did not fix it.
3. Claude generated code had an syntax error - it defined speaker port as: #DEFINE Speaker PORTB.0 . However, after fixing that issue, code compiled correctly and music also played correctly, here's video:

https://youtube.com/shorts/Kv0Qt0XBayY

[Ioannis]

Seems Claude is doing better.

Nice experiment,

Ioannis

[CuriousOne]

Yes, Gemini and GPT are bad at MIDI decoding. Claude is doing much better. I asked it to further improve the code - note frequencies are now in lookup table, not separate FREQOUT statements, so key and tempo also can be adjusted.
What's more interesting, I asked it to use built-in PWM generator of PIC18F45K80 to generate sine wave and play music using it, for better quality. And it suggested that PBP is not good for direct PWM register control, so it wrote a code with some assembly added, to handle the sine wave generation routine. Unfortunately, I've run out of credits and we have to wait when they reset to complete the task

[Ioannis]

If you don't mind, post the result please.

Ioannis

[CuriousOne]

Yes sure.
I asked claude, why it and other AI agents make same error with PBP variable definitions and other syntax issues, and as it said, this is because that PBP syntax is very similar to Visual Basic and since there is far more amount of VB code available, it has higher "weight" over PBP coding. There are two ways to avoid that - type in each session special "definition" statements for better PBP handling (it provided examples), or in paid version of Claude I can add them as "system level directives" so won't have to type by hand on each session.
Another cool feature of claude is that it estimates (I haven't checked for accuracy, btw) what amount of CPU speed in microseconds will be needed for a specific PBP operators when doing time critical tasks. And based on that it also suggests which MCU, like 12F 16F or 18F running at which speed should be used for particular piece of code.