Once upon a time, Commodore was one of the biggest names in the world of home computers and video games. Via its successful C64 and Amiga platforms, it attracted legions of fans, and seemed to typify the 'Trojan Horse' dream of the home micro; dutiful parents would buy their children these computers to help with their homework, only to discover to their horror that they were primarily used for playing games like Wizball, Paradroid, Sensible Soccer and Turrican.
It's easy to see why the recent news that YouTuber Christian "Peri Fractic" Simpson was revitalising the Commodore brand garnered so much attention. Since Commodore International went bust in the early '90s, the name has been kicked around like an empty can, occasionally being used to hawk poor-quality smartphones and other dubious devices. Long-suffering fans predictably sat up and took notice.
Simpson's plan is bold; thanks to funding from the community, he and his team have acquired the name from Commodore Corporation BV – as well as 47 original Commodore trademarks, the oldest of which dates back to 1983. He has assembled a selection of Commodore veterans to resurrect the name – including Bil Herd (lead engineer 1982-1986), Albert Charpentier (VP of Technology 1979-1984), and David Pleasance (UK VP & Joint Managing Director, 1983-1994) – and already has a new product on the horizon: The C64 Ultimate.
On paper, this all looks pretty positive. While I was never personally a Commodore user back in the day, all of my friends owned either a C64 or an Amiga, so I can certainly appreciate the brand's nostalgic pull, even in 2025. I spent many lazy summer days playing the C64 port of Double Dragon with pals, as well as "winner stays on" matches of Speedball II on the Amiga.
However, there's a curious contradiction at the very heart of "new" Commodore that I think we need to talk about a little more – and it involves everyone's favourite / most hated modern technology (delete as applicable): Artificial Intelligence, or more specifically, 'Generative AI.'
It's genuinely hard to remember a time when a technological advancement last caused so much conversation – I don't even think the arrival of the internet had so many people talking. AI is what all companies and politicians seem to be talking about at the moment: how it's going to revolutionise the world, make everyone's lives easier, and "turbocharge" the employment sector. In the US, President Trump has made it a priority to ensure North America is at the vanguard of AI development, while in the UK (where I'm writing this from), the government is equally effusive about its potential to bring the nation out of the financial doldrums it currently finds itself in.
Anyone who has read Time Extension (or a great many other websites, for that matter) will be aware that not everyone is as positive about the impact of AI, and it's fair to say that, while I can see how it can be beneficial in some ways, Gen AI is already having a hugely detrimental impact on the world. Putting aside the very obvious issues of copyright theft and plagiarism for a moment, perhaps the biggest worry to the average person on the street is that AI is already taking jobs as companies embrace it with open arms. "AI doesn't go on strike," said Elijah Clark, a CEO who advises other bosses on using AI. "It doesn't ask for a pay raise." While I'm sure shareholders are rubbing their hands with glee at this sentiment, it's not great news for human beings.
'Wait a second,' you're probably saying. What the devil does this have to do with the shiny new Commodore? Well, as Simpson kindly told us a short while ago, absolutely nothing – at least for the time being. When he made the initial announcement that he was planning to buy the brand, Time Extension (as well as other sites) was understandably concerned about his prominent use of Gen AI on this YouTube channel, Retro Recipes. Not only does he use it in the announcement video, he has created other content with tools such as Runway.ai, MidJourney.ai, Leonardo.ai and InsightFace.ai.
Simpson is quite open about the fact that he uses the tech to create images and video, claiming that he "experimented with some new video generation technologies which interest me as a video creator, musician, and artist." He claimed that the clips of him and his wife "were trained on and generated solely from images we provided specifically to save time while we focused on completing the Commodore acquisition, a major product launch, and caring for our two-year-old daughter." Putting aside the fact that not having enough time isn't really a valid excuse for using technology which steals human-made content, Gen AI video tools are trained on countless hours of footage, not just a couple of photos you've uploaded.
While some would argue that the moment you use Gen AI to make art, you're no longer the 'creator', it's worth noting that not everyone took issue with Simpson's use of the technology in his videos. "Many viewers felt the AI was used responsibly, even refreshingly," he told me back in June. It's also worth noting that companies like Google, OpenAI, Meta, Adobe and Microsoft are all pushing Gen AI on people pretty hard right now, which only serves to legitimise it in the eyes of people who might not be aware of the numerous issues surrounding it.
So, while Simpson told me that Commodore doesn't have any immediate plans to use Gen AI in its products, this could change over time:
"If AI coding, for example, just becomes a fact of how it's done in the near future, and if all schools start teaching AI across the board, does Commodore jump on as the world turns, or get spun back out into a parallel universe again, bankrupt, because no parents will buy a new Commodore if it doesn't support their child's curriculum needs?"
While I have my own personal reasons for disliking Gen AI (it's often based on stolen content, it replaces jobs for the sole benefit of business owners, it creates low-effort slop – those kinds of things), my discomfort with the revived Commodore doesn't relate to the company potentially using Gen AI in the future (something Simpson has hinted at), but the fact that so much of the marketing and messaging behind the resurrected company is focused on it being the absolute antithesis of AI.
Commodore is described as "The Digital Detox Brand – a bold stand against today's toxic tech" in a recent announcement. "Since Commodore slipped into a parallel timeline in 1994, technology that was meant to serve us, grew to enslave us. Now back in this timeline, Commodore continues as if waking directly into the 2000s – with clarity, optimism, and a mission to deliver The Future We Were Promised."
Now let me be clear – I'm 100% on board with this. I've long felt enslaved by technology, and I'm not alone. People are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that their smartphones – and the apps found on them – are often a massively negative influence on their mental wellbeing. Social media apps and instant messaging mean we never get any respite from notifications and DMs, while the addictive nature of short-form video apps like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has destroyed our attention spans. The younger generation is showing the scars of knowing nothing but smartphones, and as a result, many are turning to 'dumb' phones as a means of breaking free.
It might surprise you to learn that Simpson is one of these people, even going as far as to call himself a "Neo-Luddite". He posted an excellent video last year entitled "Ultimate Dumbphone: Bringing a 2G Y2K Phone to Life in 2024 - I'M FREE!" in which he talks about how he ditched his smartphone for one from the 2000s that only makes calls and sends text messages – it doesn't even have a camera.
The video itself is well worth a watch, as Simpson brilliantly outlines the horrendous mental and social problems smartphones have forced upon us as a society. To be clear: I'm totally on the same page as him on this topic – what disturbs me is that someone can have these opinions yet still be optimistic about "humanity's ability to harness AI for good," as he told me a few weeks ago.
Humanity has pretty much failed to put technology like social media to "good" use, so what hope is there that it will do the same with Gen AI, a 'tool' which is many times more manipulative, misleading and exploitative?
For example, AI chatbots are being used for therapy despite warnings from experts that they may "worsen mental health crises", while people are becoming worryingly attached to AI partners, even reaching the point of being hospitalised with 'AI psychosis'.
Gen AI is being used to create deepfake porn of real people without their permission, while celebrities' voices are being used to scam people. Facebook has been accused of using pretty everything posted on its site (as well as adult content) to train its AI model, and its chatbots are permitted to hold "sensual" conversations with children. The process of creating things with AI is causing water shortages and other environmental problems at a time when our planet is already on its knees.
Amazon's best-seller lists are clogged with AI-written books, and YouTube is being filled with AI-slop videos. Meanwhile, a Human Rights commissioner in Australia voiced concern that AI could "worsen racism and sexism" in the country. Funeral directors are using AI to create obituaries, some of which are often full of errors and disrespectful to the person's memory. And as for AI as a tool to help us reach new heights? Some coders find it actually slows them down, when it's not deleting years of work, that is. Things are often so bad that companies have to spend more money fixing mistakes made by AI.
At times, I feel like we're living in a livestreamed episode of Black Mirror, and it only seems to be getting worse, not better (perhaps, like Principal Skinner, I'm just an old man who is hopelessly out of touch in this situation).
Sure, there are positive uses for AI – it can be used to fight disease and enable scientific breakthroughs, for starters – but even some of the biggest names in the realm of the technology are voicing their concerns about the impact it will have on humanity.
“I fear — for the time being — that while there will be a growing minority benefitting ever more significantly with these tools, most people will continue to give up agency, creativity, decision-making and other vital skills to these still-primitive AIs,” said futurist John Smart wrote in an essay entitled “The Future of Being Human,” Even Microsoft itself, a key pusher of AI tech, has revealed that it actually makes you dumber.
Remember the days before smartphones, when you had to memorise multiple phone numbers? Now I can only remember my own number, as I know all of the other ones I need are safely stored in my phone's memory, ready to be found whenever I need them. I am allowing that part of my brain to entropy, to waste away. It's like a muscle, and if we don't exercise it, we stand to lose its power.
This is a good example of how technology, which is supposed to empower us, actually enfeebles us, and AI has the potential to be an order of magnitude worse, as millions of people are already allowing it to write their text messages, compose emails, create images, produce videos and much, much more.
If that doesn't sound like technological enslavement, I don't know what does – which is why I'm absolutely baffled by Simpson's insistence that his vision of Commodore is one of freedom and 'detoxifcation' from the evils of modern technology. Surely he would apply this vision to all of his endeavours, including his YouTube channel and the potential future of Commodore itself?
To reiterate, I have nothing against Simpson himself. His videos are well-written and well-produced (apart from the Gen AI bits), and his thoughts on digital detoxification I can 100% agree with; I often find myself doom-scrolling on my phone when I should be doing other, more productive stuff, and I rarely feel any better about myself afterwards. His celebration of simpler technology should be applauded – and it should be noted that he has already stated that Commodore will "always listen to the community", so it may well be that the new version of the brand won't choose to leverage Gen AI in the future.
I just can't fathom how he has so willingly hitched his cart to the AI bandwagon in the belief that it will empower us, given all of the evidence to the contrary.