ChatGPT rewrote Themify WPS code

[cereal_killer]

Hello, I like the Themify theme for the iPods very much and would love to use it on my Shanling Q1. Until now I just changed a few lines of code to themes I wanted to modify, but never rewrote a complete WPS file to convert a theme.

So I tried to let ChatGPT rewrite the code for a screen with a resolution of 360x400 (see attachment).

What do you think. Is the output correct?

ChatGPT failed to rewrite the SBS code. Maybe I need to give it more information.

[Frankenpod]

What a strange exercise.  Would be interesting if it worked.  At first glance I don't see how this line

%dr(387, 27, 9, 18)

could be valid if the player has a resolution of 360x400

[cereal_killer]

It was more an experiment than a serious try. CatGPT corrected this to

%dr(351, 27, 9, 18)

I would have been surprised if everything would have worked out perfectly.

But what are the next steps for converting? Adding touch areas? Adjusting the sbs and resize the bitmaps proportionally?

[Frankenpod]

Don't really know anything about using ChatGPT.   It does sound like the sort of thing, in general, that it might be able to do.

  But the process of converting resolutions is pretty damn mechanical anyway so you could probably write a strictly traditional procedural sort of program to do it (which I did think of attempting, when converting umpteen themes, but couldn't be bothered in the end) - whereas, whatever it is that ChatGPT does (which I gather is more complex than that?) seems like it might be overkill and could actually be _too_ creative, i.e. would end up adding nonsense that 'looks' right but doesn't work.

But yeah, all the bitmaps would need resizing as well.  I've never dealt with touch enabled players but if the Q1 works that way, that would be needed, I guess - and that bit seems something that would need more than just a mechanical process, it would have to "think" about how to do it...be interesting what it comes up with.

[Dook]

I've chatted with Dave Barkan a bit about using AI for themes, I will say I'm not a fan of AI nor using it for this stuff, from his experiments though I could see it just isn't suited for making themes and makes a lot of errors (I imagine due a lack of training data on the subject).

If you were to convert the theme for the Q1, it would be pretty difficult. I take full responsibility for that, the theme is quite complex and not well documented. I did actually try to port it to the Q1 myself, but I found it hard to get it to look right in the WPS. It's something I would like to take a go at again someday. With the different aspect ratio screens it would require a rebuild from scratch, or at least a re-write of each part to be designed for the screen ratio.

[Frankenpod]

Honestly, for converting themes between resolutions it would be easier to write a normal kind of program to do the conversion - it would, I guess, share a lot of code with the actual WPS interpreter code in Rockbox.

  Which in turn makes me wonder if that code could have been written/could be re-written to be resolution-independent?  Such that themes would specify co-ordinates on, say, a nominal 1000x1000 scale, and the theme engine would just scale them to scale to fit the actual screen resolution.  I assume there's a very good reason why it doesn't work that way, though, and I'm not the guy to do it, but it seems the logical end-point of considering using AI to do it.

  Pretty sure something like ChatGPT would produce something weird, as it would all be based on looking plausible as code, without really understanding the underlying point of fitting the screen resolution.

[Dook]

There was  a theme being worked on a few years ago that attempted to do just that, it used the percentages features among other things to create a 'universal' theme. I think all that needed to be changed was some asset stuff for each device. I think this theme from github is the one.

For simple themes it could probably work really well. For themify it likely wouldn't as I had to add stuff very meticulously to work around theme engine bugs, especially to make the re-colourable features work as intended.

I've been experimenting a little myself with creating scripts for my themes. Adwaitapod especially has become a bit of a behemoth to work on, so if I want to add more features in the future I'll need to make it more scripted than hand written. I might try work on a cross-device theme script someday.