Digging Into the Worrying Depths of AI Minecraft

[@Phizzy]

The fake Minecraft footage makes me feel sick. Not like with disgust at the plagiarism machine etc. Just the world melting makes me feel queasy. Horrible to look at

[@Alienrun]

I feel the exact same way! The feeling hasn't even gone away after a couple of minutes! I feel this way about most Ai video...SOME looks fine enough...others...not so much! But something about seeing it applyed to a video game just makes it that much worse. Throughout my whole life seeing a video game being played puts a certain part of my mind at ease, just seeing someone have full control of their avatar in a digital world...its nice. This just feels messed up though! And not like in a dream like sense where everything is distorted...this feels worse than that in a way that's hard to explain. Its not human...and I find that disturbing and...yes it makes me queasy as well! :O

[@griffinhan-lalime4357]

@@AlienrunI think the video described it well. Everything you think you can trust in a normal game is not trustworthy in Oasis. It feels meaningless at best and induces paranoia at worst, because it subverts player control and a stable sense of place and time at every moment. At least in bad normal games, you can get stuck. In Oasis, it’s very disconcerting to quickly realize that not only will you never get anywhere you want to go, but just in response to looking around, you will be dragged somewhere frightening and confusing. You’re not allowed the required time or stable feedback to get bored.

[@erikjohnson9112]

It is important for learning in the field, but useless to anyone playing games. It is almost like navigating a dream where object permanence is not a thing; out of sight, out of mind, out of existence.

[@Streifi]

It's very dreamlike. In fact, it reminds me of some minecraft-related dreams I had, where either the art-style got distorted or mixed and mashed up with elements of other games or the real world. They should call it a dream emulator, because that's what it's most closely related to. But it's as far from a real game as one can possibly be. Given, it's interactive, you can move around, and turn and interact, but the directions can flip on an instant, the interactions rendered meaningless due to the random outcome of those attempts, which takes the "game" aspect out of it. Is is interactive? Yes. Is it an experience? Certainly (no matter what one might think about said experience). Is it a "game" worth "playing"? Certainly not.

[@SecondBestArtMuseum]

This reminds me of actual dreams. Like, you’re in school walking to class but somehow the stairs completely skip the second floor and you have to walk down the third floor hallway and leap over a railing and climb down to the second floor and then you have to shimmery through a miniature version of the hall and slip into an open field where people are having lunch, and then you realize you’re in your underwear but it’s okay because you have an invisibility cloak. You just have to be careful and not be noticed by the pterodactyl.

[@ratlinggull2223]

sounds like typical from software level design 😆

[@-nomi.-]

Yeah it's not good... but I think it would be more boring if it was. As it is it's a kind of fascinating, surreal experience that veers to horror. It's stepping into a familiar world that has zero of the rules a world needs to exist. There's that sequence in tons of games where your character is poisoned or their mind otherwise affected by something evil. It's always some colourful psychedelic effect or some blurred edges with no impact besides maybe some imaginary enemies. If what happens in this Minecraft thing happened suddenly instead, I'd genuinely freak out.

[@FunkbusterG]

@@ratlinggull2223 Hey, Dark Souls 2 was a different time, okay?

[@bencesarvari2235]

You're playing a dementia patient's memory of minecraft.

[@jackiespaceman]

Every block everywhere at the end of infinity

[@bencesarvari2235]

@jackiespaceman Exactly. Except that album is fire and this is soulless garbage.

[@alanh2820]

Exactly this. I said it was like a dream. But dementia works too lol

[@ZILtoid1991]

Weirdly enough there is an actual Doom mod with that concept. It's surreal horror at its finest.

[@masterkill165]

@bencesarvari2235 You say that like it's a bad thing, but I think that sounds like a super interesting experience. You sold me on this. im going to try this out.

[@mknoyle]

I initially misread the thumbnail as "ALL GAMING IS AWFUL" and thought it was a pretty bold turn for you.

[@iamjustkiwi]

The most searing take of all

[@INeedUrTurnips]

based

[@JB-un9or]

Gaming was a mistake smh 😔

[@anguswilson6234]

Fair and reasonable

[@WhoIsSirChasm]

They don't even have the common decency to call it "M-AI-ncraft".

[@djbeema]

Hearing this in a Rich Evans voice: Maaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiinecraft!

[@rockhound3.14]

Ew 😂😢😅

[@TheGeneReyva]

Seen some AI minecraft. Person was climbing a hill and once the hill filled the screen, the AI's lack of object permanence kicked in and decided he was looking directly at the floor. E: Fill screen with sheep. It is now a mountain side.

[@Miraihi]

The developers of Oasis had to forego most of the context buffer to make the experimental project run more smoothly. This thing is really more of a novelty/proof of concept than a game.

[@Furebel]

@@Miraihi This context buffer wouldn't save it, there are no calculations regarding any sort of persistence being done. It's just video being generated live. This kind of AI can't and will not be able to seew hatever it generated before in any possible way, nor could it ever communicate with a game in meaningful way. The best thing this kind of AI will ever be able to do in games is to play a support role for post-processing, or a similar kind of AI that's for example given simple inputs and trained to behave like a player, but that tech existed way before generative AI.

[@SigmaLongshot]

I'm a 19-year veteran of the games industry (im 40 now), in AAA and indie - worked at Ubisoft, Rare, EA, you name it! The only people clamouring for genAI are, sadly, the top floor executives with zero actual development experience. They see Magic Robot That Creates Anything You Desire and go "ka-ching!," without considering for one second how the model was trained, whose work was stolen to train it, and quite importantly how long this wild west can continue before governments start to litigate on intellectual property ownership rights extensions, compensation for targets of training, and more. Effectively, whilst the technology will improve, that's not to say every country will permit this unimpeded data grab/IP skimming forever. Ultimately I see it like this, bud - Pot Noodle and Spam did not kill off restaurant dining. GenAI fills the niche of the "machine-made slurry of questionable origin which doesn't overly impress nor satisfy, but does the job in a pinch." Like spam, some will see that as good enough to consume every day with no regard beyond a full belly. Others will see it as a last resort - a "when all else fails" option. And others, and I'd argue a fairly decent number, they'd simply rather spend a little extra now and again to sit in a person's restaurant with a loved one, and dine knowing it was hand-crafted with love; to enjoy each carefully-crafted morsel and refer back to them fondly when they do have to eat a Pot Noodle a week before payday. I don't see GenAI as replacing me for the games that I make nor the customers I make my games for. I see GenAI as making for a customer who only sees content, not craft. Who doesn't care if the eggs are free range or not... they just want the cheapest eggs. Those who don't care if Nestle steals water from the poor and needy, because they want a kit kat. Simply put, those who respect beyond the surface level will always want human-made games. We may lose some customers overall... but those were just people who found cheaper Pot noodles and spam.

[@cataclystp]

19 year old veteran? as in having worked in the industry for 19 years?

[@SigmaLongshot]

@cataclystp haha, yes - in the industry for 19 years, I'm 40. Man, I WISH I was still 19 though

[@knight808]

Hey! I'm entering the indie game scene, currently 19 (not far from your age when you mentioned starting out!) And I'd love to reach out for a few bits of wisdom, as I'm not a programming master at all, but I've had a concept in mind that i hope would change a small bit of the scene, atleast a passion compared to the nonsense that is Machine Learning most big companies are investing into.

[@zackanderson7440]

I honestly just wonder why it seems like every executive thinks only in numbers and the like, they can't seriously be this foolish, can they?

[@sgas]

I would instead worry about the lack of quality control because genai is NOT a one button push content machine. You NEED a human to filter and prepare for good results, without it, its trash

[@samb1055]

The longer the AI hype cycle continues, the less I'm worried about it when it comes to art, honestly. The comparison to NFTs, I think, is very apt. Something that blows up, grifters looking to make a quick buck (or a lot of bucks) dive all the way into it, and then people catch on that its got no clothes and the market for it crashes to nothing. People talk about how "amazing" AI is, and how good it's gotten recently, but I've never seen a bit of it that didn't suck. "But it can make videos that..." yeah, I saw the woman walking down the street. I saw her jacket randomly morph when some of it was outside the screen for a moment. The fundamental problem with AI, as it stands now, is that AI doesn't know anything. It doesn't know that 2 + 2 = 4. If you ask it for the answer to 2 + 2, it calculates that many other people have said 4 in the past, so it says 4. But it doesn't know that. This may seem like a pedantic distinction, but it's the core of why AI is so bad outside of tiny little windows of use, and why even in those tiny windows it needs to be watched like a hawk so it doesn't do something like tell you to Elmer's your pepperoni to your pizza. I don't think anything has demonstrated this so clearly as AI Minecraft. Just think about what had to happen for MAInecraft to exist: 1. Create Minecraft 2. Minecraft gets insanely popular 3. Minecraft becomes one of the most-streamed games of all time (or is it THE most-streamed game?) 4. Tech company spends probably millions of dollars to train a model on Minecraft videos 5. Tech company releases a broken mess that can't remember anything that happens offscreen because AI doesn't know anything "But it's going to get better!" people like to say. But, let me tell you a secret: it won't. Literally, the LLMs are out of data to hoover up; they're as good as they're going to get. And they're not good. But more importantly, the fact that AI doesn't know anything is the structure of the system. It's not something that can be "fixed". Someone would have to invent an entirely new technology, at which point we're talking about something else. But also, look at what it took to make MAInecraft. Look at step one! The only way to make a "game" with AI... is to have already made that game! Not just already made that game, but it has to be a simple game, with a very consistent UI and look, and millions of hours of available video to suck into the model. And then, the AI can spit out a Cronenbergian nightmare that, in some single frames, looks similar to the original. Yes, they'll reach a point where they can say, "Make Minecraft, except replace the sheep with facehuggers from the Alien game I also trained you on". But that just means they have to make TWO games before they can make their one bad AI game. And the more complex the game, and the more you feed into the model, the less the AI will be able to handle it. Just look at the inventory in MAInecraft. Someday, I'm sure they'll get that into the model in a usable-ish manner (except it won't remember what items you have because it can't know anything). But imagine if the model was trained on a hundred different games, and you tried to "prompt" the UI into a usable system, and "prompt" how inventory worked. The AI can't handle that. And the poor employees that are ordered to make it work will try, I'm sure, and get fired when they can't deliver, I'm sure. But, quite simply, the technology is not able to do it. There are plenty of areas that I'm worried about AI. Surveillance, law enforcement, internet search, driving, propaganda, etc.. Mostly, because it's going to be "lying at scale" and people are going to rely on those lies and die (see: mushroom foraging as written by AI), and/or because it's going to remove accountability from a critical decision (no person crashed the car, the AI crashed the car). Art will be as fine as it ever was. Artists might have a hard time while foolish bosses fire them expecting AI to fill the gaps, but AI will not fill the gaps. Nobody's going to buy MAInecraft, or the movie version of it, or the novel version of it. Because it's bad. Even images, which is arguably where "AI art" is strongest, the result is very samey, very soulless, very obvious. The people wanting it didn't want art in the first place. To take Adam Savage's words and treat them like my own: Art is about presenting a point of view. A machine does not have a point of view, so what it makes is not art.

[@TheOnlyTaps]

📌💯

[@RacingSnails64]

Extremely good points. Thank you.

[@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051]

On your point about creating an entirely new technology, they would still call it AI. This isn't AI either; they call this language model stuff AI for marketing purposes. So if they created an intelligent AI, it would still be called AI, my brother.

[@samb1055]

@@aldiascholarofthefirstsin1051 They would call it AI. That changes literally nothing about what I said. The point is that the technology to do what people claim LLMs can be "improved" to is not possible with the current technology. Something new, which does not currently exist in any form, will need to be invented. The names of these things is irrelevant; what's important is the technology.

[@SHDW-nf2ki]

It'll burst, and then it'll surge back.

[@pooroldnostradamus]

This is how Alan Wake has been playing Minecraft in the Dark Place.

[@MaddyMays]

It's what Minecraft would be like in the Upside Down.

[@carebear1470]

"It's not a mine, it's a cave"

[@Shmicah1235]

The aspirations of AI really remind me of the misplaced ambition of alchemy in olden times. People were desperately looking for a way to turn commonplace low-value lead into gold, completely ignorant of the fact that even if they succeeded it would reduce the value of gold to nothing. In success, they would find no value. In much the same way, even if AI was successfully polished to the point where it could make art and games to a serviceable quality, it would be rendered entirely homogenized and oversaturated to the point where none of it would have any value. It wouldn't be a cash cow, because if it's that easy then what's stopping any other company from doing it? What about it makes it special enough to be worth playing?

[@-nomi.-]

It's an apt comparison because the value of what alchemy would become is everything except the goal of transmuting metals to gold. Chemistry has benefitted our lives in ways much more meaningful the ability to turn lead to gold ever would be. In the same vein we dedicate tons of compute to the idea of replacing artists when we have practical use cases for AI that actually benefit our lives. AI helps us discover drugs, gives us an understanding of protein structure we would otherwise never had and as a programming tool is efficient enough that many gaming computers can run it capably. Yet companies still try to turn lead into gold.

[@Yeetomato]

very good take

[@kenpanderz]

"when everyone has millions of dollars in gold, no one will" - Syndrome minutes before he floods the world with bars of artificially created gold

[@legandaryprinnygamer8886]

The most impressive thing about AI minecraft is how it managed to perfectly encapsulate what it feels like to navigate a Nightmare.

[@ShadowMakesSomeArt]

a Dream*, a weird one. A nightmare would be worse.

[@Blear_Mind]

this is what it fells to sleep on antipsychotics

[@noaag]

@@ShadowMakesSomeArt i think i ended up in the Nether when i clocked in for my 10 minutes of bewilderment and frustration. that was kind of like a nightmare. looked and played like shit though, so it wasn't "scary" in the least. it felt more like when running a sentence from Dante's Inferno through 80 languages in google translate and getting out a poop joke.

[@Breegullbeak]

The idea of tricking the game into sending you to another biome by looking at blocks from that biome is an awesome idea. It just can't be the whole game.

[@bobisnotaperson]

Would actually be an interesting gimmick for a minecraft exploration/puzzle map, though sadly map making isn't as big of a thing anymore.

[@VVulf_chan]

What I was thinking- the tech might be able to be used as a Portal-style puzzle gimmick but the tech bros pushing this don't care about gaming outside of it's basic presence in pop culture.

[@pyerack]

The only cool thing about this is the idea of using some form of crazy travel method. Players can gain access to a "mirror" dimension that is always warping and you can somewhat navigate but you cannot fully control where it sends you.

[@Breegullbeak]

@pyerack the first I heard about this feature was people using it to trick the game to teleport them to the nether to try and Speedrun the game in the five minutes. No control is actually really cool. You'd just need a way to know where you were. Imagine a feature that just teleports you thousands of blocks away from where you were to a random place? That'd be great for those who want to adventure.

[@Art_Beat]

As a game developer, I don't feel threatened by AI. Not because I think it will "empower developers" or any ridiculous nonsense like that, but rather that all the AI slop we've seen so far just doesn't impress me. Oasis is a quaint little tech demo to show to investors, but by many definitions it doesn't even qualify as a game, let alone a GOOD game. Evangelists will say "but the technology will improve over time", but there are some constraints baked into this method of AI generation that makes creating a game literally impossible, a primary one being persistence. Game worlds need to be persistent, especially in a game featuring building structures as a primary mechanic, and AI models are incapable of large scale persistence. The more work you do to try and introduce persistence, e.g. adding models and textures that the game generates and saves to be loaded later, the more it starts to resemble a traditional game engine. Eventually you will get to a point where it's just worse procedural generation. There's obviously a whole host of other problems-like how there are no actual mechanics in the game, only hallucinations of mechanics-but if I went into detail on all of the failings of AI in gaming, I would be here writing this comment for eternity.

[@aconcernedindividual297]

It's really impressive that a computer can (sort of) simulate Minecraft without actually playing Minecraft, but what's even the practical application? Nobody wants to play the weird incoherent LSD Dream Emulator version of Minecraft, it probably takes way more tech to actually run than the real thing, it's nauseating to look at, and completely unplayable as a game. So. Who is it for? What purpose does it serve? Why were so many resources put into making it? Who will even care about it? It's like spending billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours of research and labor to develop a 5 hour long process for putting on your shoes.

[@e-tean-son4146]

Keep in mind, this model was made by a company of 20 people (more or less, but it is small) i see these as small projects that look into experimenting with this tecnology and knowing it's limits before putting it to do important things

[@enirya]

The reason why so many resources were put into making it is actually because the answer to "who will even care about it?" is venture capitalists. They don't understand games, and they don't understand technology, let alone AI, but they've been told that AI is going to change everything. The people who made this will pitch it to VCs as a proof of concept for how AI can make games without the need for humans, and then tell them "imagine if you extrapolate this, the models get better, and it can make anything!" and then the VCs will give them millions of dollars in funding. And the play stats from people who were curious about the trainwreck will be in their powerpoint presentation to show the amount of supposed player interest this is already getting.

[@Interference22]

All of these AI game models are attempting to give executives a "make game" button and they fail on every conceivable metric. They're alarmingly inconsistent, perform terribly, and require several thousand times more processing power compared to a regular game engine to produce something much worse. Not only do they not work, it's doubtful they'd ever work: you can tell the people who developed this have no idea how a game works because the core concepts don't take into account anything necessary to actually produce one.

[@pyerack]

We already saw this when they kept trying to make AI art a few years back. The tech will get better with time. The argument should always be that this is all based on stolen data and infringing upon basic copyright.

[@TheSkaOreo]

Here’s a cynical take: it honestly doesn’t even matter if AI can get good enough because that’s not its purpose. Its purpose is to be “good enough” to justify getting rid of talent (not that the industry needs any more of a reason to let people go) and allow corpos to shit out product faster and faster. But even worse: I think there’s a large contingent of people who just don’t give a shit. Don’t care about art, don’t care about the people who make it. They just want the thing and it being somewhat decent. And that’s enough.

[@darksidegryphon5393]

You are right. A lot of people do *not* care about art, just look at the success of fast fashion. Most people do *not* want to think, they see music as background noise, they see movies as something to play in the background while you scroll endlessly on their phone, they see nature as an empty space between cities, they only see themselves. Society has become atomised.

[@stephano2314]

Here's a more cynical take: AI is just a symptom of Late Stage Capitalism. In an unsustainable system where infinite growth of wealth is demanded Companies try to cut any corner possible. This is just another way to cut corners, the idea of no longer needing to pay for half as many workers is why the Corpos see it as a potential gold mine, the modern world being so tangled with electronics simply facilitate this. They know most consumers are idiots and will keep mindlessly consuming regardless. It's not about art nor innovation. It's about "How do we make cheaper products in faster ways which we can sell at premium prices while paying less workers?" If you needed more evidence that our current economical system only leads to our demise this AI trend is always here on a daily basis. We will be pushed to the brink till our backs break.

[@arenkai]

Honestly, there is a great artsy indie experience with dream logic to build with this concept.

[@Blear_Mind]

if wasn't soulless company garbage

[@coolcatvibes5491]

Does Jack Black dream of electric sheep?

[@loganressler9173]

underrated comment

[@LambHoot]

the parallel to music democratization you start drawing at 18:46 is a fantastic summary of this issue. Electronic audio workstations and AI have very different use cases in education today - one as a tool for learning, the other as a shortcut. While ai Minecraft definitely has no intent beyond “look what we can do, now pay us”, players are able to force context onto it by metagaming. I was captivated recently by the “speedrunning” challenges that cropped up around this sludgy ai Minecraft. On its own, the frame-by-frame gameplay is directionless, but speedrunning offers it structure. The way players figured out how to manipulate things like color to get the game to “generate” conditions they’re looking for (ex: a portal, a house, or a time of day) is crazy. Challenges like “how fast can you get to sunset” are really fun to watch. Players are sculpting purpose into the meaningless of each frame, turning it into a real game. I love speedrunners 😂 Great video 🙏

[@jjones1032]

Once you understand how this works, it's more like a magic trick than a technological wonder. It's simply a predictive model that, given enough reference data (such as millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay), is able to mimic something that looks like Minecraft. It's not actually creating Minecraft. It's not generating game code or making a game. It's creating a facsimile of what a game looks like while it's being played.

[@ConstructMorePylons]

This is a super important point. I legitimately don’t understand the reasoning behind Oasis at all, or how anyone can look at the product and be like, “oh yeah, we’re on the right track with this.” It’s being marketed as AI generated games, but what it actually is, at best, is a trash quality twitch stream of a horrendously bad game. At the core of the technology, Oasis is more like generating a tv show than a game - your inputs don’t really affect the game world, as there’s no mechanics or systems or even object permanence. There’s just an image on the screen, followed by more images that look similar.

[@aksen303]

when the AI minecraft footage first started, i wondered why someone had recorded it off a CRT monitor with a 2002 era digital camera, and thought "well, shortly he'll start showing his own capture and it will at least look a bit better". took a couple of minutes to realise that first footage WAS the proper capture...

[@Cappocchi]

Like most companies riding the AI hypetrain, they're putting Decart before Dehorse.

[@raedev]

The main issue with it being so blurry and "shifting reality" when you look away or at a weird angle, is that AI models have no "memory" of what the game actually has going on except for what is visible on the image you feed into them. For that you'd have to actually have a game running in the background and relegate the AI generation to rendering the world. Which is billions of times more expensive computationally than just... rendering it with modern 3D techniques, and it also defeats the whole point of "AI generating the game" cause no, the game was programmed and AI just generates the visuals then. You could at least to some extent reduce that, add things to the AI so it remembers "oh you put a flower here" so if it turns around it "remembers" that there's a flower there, instead of just having it generate the next frame based on the previous one. But that is... programming. You're not replacing the programmers, or the devs, or having the AI "generate the game", at that point. You are merely shifting what job they have to do now. And that's the main problem. AI is a tool that can make certain aspects of the creative process easier, if immorally so. It is not, and it will never be, a tool that can do "everything". It will never be able to "generate a whole game" without there being any form of gameplay structure underneath it that is well defined by a human - and I mean _well defined in code_, not just in the prompt and praying to god the AI remembers the prompt. It will never be able to "generate whole new artworks" without it "learning" how to do it by taking bits and pieces from millions of artists. It can take on simpler jobs, like simulating a human-like voice, or creating vague dialogue based on an NPC's predefined personality. But the moment you try to go further, it'll fail. It simply lacks most of the elements required for it to do anything further, and some of those elements can't be reliably replaced by AI.

[@wheelskellington3112]

the footage used for 'people yearning for creativity' being from a remake is a pretty good highlight of another industry issue

[@TharcThuncBa]

When I saw the initial Stable Diffusion and GPT models, I made the classic blunder of forgetting the slippery slope, seeing it at the time as an ephemeral novelty. Never mind art or employment, now I'm starting to worry we're entering into an incoherent hyperreality as we drown in the ocean of AI garbage that is soon going to comprise the world we perceive.

[@umbaupause]

You know, this is a good point. People conveniently seem to forget AI's biggest glaring weakness - it cannot create from 'nothing'. This stuff and the AI doom thing are cool and all, but they required people to tightly design a real game first. These things are just weird warped mirror versions of the things they imitate. And that's what they really are to me too - not games, but a carnival novelty.

[@porkwhisperer3050]

Do you think people can create anything without using some previous experience? If you can’t see can you imagine sight? I’d argue all things we create are alterations of something we already know. It’s just these alterations and combinations reference much much more knowledge and understanding than the ai can currently. Artificial intelligence will need to become much much more advanced to be able to understand the universe enough in order to emulate any human made game.

[@umbaupause]

@@porkwhisperer3050 Fine, we don't need, oh I dunno, a whole actual game first. Honestly though, this whole tech bro fanatic AI d*ckriding is already getting on my nerves enough to despise it anyway. AI here, AI there. Slap some garbage together and any project goes. Miss me with that. Now why don't you go and enjoy some totally original AI creations, which are totally not just rearrangements of previous works.

[@porkwhisperer3050]

@@umbaupause Are you implying I’m pro AI? For clarification I’m not. I was just pointing out your argument for why AI can’t emulate human art isn’t a very good one.

[@theobrominator]

What I hate about Silicon Valley's promotion of generative AI, is that instead of seeing what it does well with and applying it to something useful and social good, it's just being shoved everywhere hoping to be the first to profit. Billions have been invested and there hasn't been much ROI, they're getting more desperate as time goes on. A great use would be generating NPC banter as you walk through a city. That way it wouldn't repeat and it's not critical path content.

[@omegahaxors9-11]

That and you could hide secrets in NPC dialog that you'd have to talk them into giving out. Misnavigate the conversation and you lock yourself out of that secret. But it's like NFTs in that sure you can BS up a use but the core intent is foul and will only result in bad outcomes.

[@PlebNC]

It's funny you mention NPC banter. Ubisoft has a tech demo attempting that very thing and there is a KZbinr who has made a My Little Pony AI powered chatbot where you can wander around a 3D game world of Ponyville and talk to Pony NPCs who react to your prompts using the chatbot and generated voicelines. It's very robotic but technically impressive.

[@OddNiffer]

AI is a curse and the sooner the bubble pops and those massive companies lose all their money, the better.

[@siristhedragon]

As a game dev myself, I struggle to see any potential utility in AI, even if it were "used for good" or whatever. The basic fundamentals of how it works makes it either useless or reliant on theft. Like what artist is going to bother uploading their entire body of work as training data just to get an AI model that shits out half-measures with absolutely 0 new life? Having no control at all over what it even gives you. What voice actor is going to be happy replacing themselves with the garbled phantoms of their prior performances? The tech as it exists just simply isn't useful to artists past maybe a smart fill tool in photoshop, or generating some surreal audio samples for experimental music...

[@ImSixty]

Oasis is what I feel like I'll remember Minecraft when I'm in a nursing home in my 70s

[@sunla]

If I wanted to hallucinate and have a bad trip, I would just do drugs. That's what this is, a digital bad trip

[@boatjohn604]

I'm gonna be honest. I literally could not watch this video past a certain point because the visuals made me nauseous

[@loganressler9173]

Yeah after a bit I had to listen to it like a podcast

[@Yamartim]

when you transition from using the oasis footage to showing actual minecraft it looks like those "rtx on/off" comparisons with how much more sense the visuals make

[@Zer0_Ph34r]

As someone who works as a programmer and did some work with AI in school, I can safely say that I'm not really concerned with AI in the long term. Artists and creatives that are currently employed should be worried due to short sighted budget cuts thinking that AI can replace them, but these industries will quickly learn that this "AI" has no real longevity and will continue to produce worse results as time passes. This "Generative AI" is inherintly non-generative. This AI amounts to essentially having every pixle or letter (depending on what it's being used for) weighted against millions of pieces of data and the algorithm very quickly allocates what it considers to be the highest valued pixel/letter based on the input data. The models can't get much better than they already are without WAY more training data, this method of training is becoming more and more difficult, and it takes real artists a long time to actually create something new. The point being, "AI" is about as good as it can get right now, and that's not very good. It can convince some people that it's the way of the future, but most people know it's a grift and that's why so many companies are jumping on board. For a while, just having "AI" as something your company worked on/with was enough to boost your market value. Now, the inverse is true and people recognize that "AI" generally means something is of inferior quality. I don't think we're ever going to fully get rid of AI because it has tricked too many people, but the chances that anyone realistically attempts to use AI for real work in the future is pretty negligable. I just hope that the artists of today don't suffer too much in the mean time

[@tuckerpartridge5717]

This is some of your best writing to date. What’s incredibly sad to me is that AI should be used to fulfill menial labor and free us to pursue more creative endeavors. Who knows what kinds of art could be produced with that free time.

[@ShadowMakesSomeArt]

EXACTLY. In all those old sci fi films an and robots were doing the janitor job, this should work like that, and leave creation to humans.

[@TheSkaOreo]

Though for that to happen people would need to have money for their basic needs. That can’t work when most American families are living paycheck to paycheck

[@tuckerpartridge5717]

@ Totally agree. The use of AI for labor purposes would require our incentive structures to be focused on people rather than profit. We don’t live in that world, but I do believe it’s possible.

[@robertschwalb4469]

@@TheSkaOreo In a world where all the menial labor jobs are taken by robots, the only way I see for society to function at all is to reorganize society with these robots in mind. In a perfect world, these robots would free up the resources spent on employing all of those people and said resources could then be redirected to benefit the average person. But that wouldn't happen in this world because those freed up resources would be in the hands of companies who only ever care about the average person to the extent of those people being customers.

[@Ventraeus]

As an artist and animator, im so glad gen ai is ruining my hobby and job :,)

[@Ventraeus]

@GreenBlueWalkthrough Photography, CGI, and Painting are all art but fall under different mediums. Each exists without the other. Gen AI can only exist with a database, and 99% of the time is trained off of stolen/uncredited work. People will argue that the techs whole purpose is to make art more "accessible," but paper and pencils are much more accessible than an expensive monthly subscription to a service.

[@andyyo9554]

Don't worry, it will eventually destroy every other job and hobby too! Welcome to the post-truth future we are burning our current society and culture down for, all because a handful of people who already have basically infinite money want to have infinite +1 dollars.

[@luckyducky7819]

@@andyyo9554 AI will to many things, but it won't lead us to a post truth future. If anything, it'd motivate more people to get up, go outside, and investigate themselves when they hear about something. I'm seeing normal people right now going "don't believe that, its probably AI", so I have no reason to believe they'll suddenly 180 and uncritically believe the AI.

[@Arakus99]

@@luckyducky7819 honestly I think it’ll just lead to people dismissing everything they disagree with as ai and saying everything they do agree with is real Obviously reality intrudes to a certain extent but for the most part I think this will just make it easier to silo people into different info bubbles and pit them against each other There were already so many people buying into networks of obvious disinformation and nonsense before ai, and most of them seem to be willing to believe anything if it’s said with conviction and confirms their pre-existing beliefs My deepest fear is that it’ll become easier to cover up actual atrocities by saying the evidence is ai, especially in places with heavy government information control (and it seems like a lot of places are headed that direction…)

[@Blear_Mind]

i have hope this wont last

[@humanharddrive1]

They will never take gaming away from me. I will continue playing old-ass text-based roguelikes instead of the ai slop.

[@bencesarvari2235]

I love your outlook on this. Protect workers, protect people, protect humanity.

[@AllaiyahWeyn]

I've stopped worrying about it. People are increasingly turning to indie games & retro games. Some combine the two by porting indie games to old consoles.

[@OSW]

The worst thing is that it's on the scale of being a game. It's above 0/10. Even if it only improves 0.3% a month, it'll be "good enough" in a few years. We need the ESRB to demand transparency for AI games asap

[@Stammer6]

Watching the "gameplay" footage made me consciously think about just how much processing power was done in the back-end to even make that appear. Every 5 minutes someone is allowed to access their server probably has a noticeable impact on the global temperature lol I just imagine thousands of GPU's all operating at capacity just to make this nightmare of an experience even possible.

[@degiguess]

The discord contest on the side of the screen is so disingenuous that it's actually absurd. Genuinely after 5 minutes of experimenting and testing the limits of the "game" I'd be shocked if there was anybody gullible enough to think that any of those "challenges" were actually possible.

[@toyo8460]

Actually a nether and end does exist, it's just very difficult to get there.

[@ShadowMakesSomeArt]

one guy actually found a creeper, but when it exploded it changed to another dimension, so idk if that counts

[@MaakaSakuranbo]

You're thinking in terms of normal Minecraft. If you look at a block up close that resembles endtstone enough then turn around,y ou might find yourself in the End, for example.

[@21kaduku]

Great job on this. Sometimes it's nice to hear the frustrations of others about AI, so I can remember I'm not just going crazy.

[@AmazingMrMe123]

A insightful poet I follow on Instagram said about AI writing "why should I bother to read something no one bothered to write" and in the same vain, "why should I take the time to play a game no one took the time to make". The problem I have with a lot of AI is the intent more so than the tech itself. It sees the fact that you need people to create art as a problem to be solved. I disagree. People dying laboring in mines is a problem, and solving it by replacing human miners with machines is an improvement. People laboring away to produce art is not a problem.

[@alanh2820]

I haven’t finished the video yet but if I could describe playing this game it would be like playing a dream (or nightmare) of Minecraft. The images are hazy and you don’t really have control over anything. And when you wake up you don’t really know what just hit you.

[@alanh2820]

I can’t finish the video. Not because the video’s bad. But because the game is so bad it makes my blood boil. Who releases this kinda stuff? People with really thick skin.

[@brandonjeffi5976]

The discussion in this video was fascinating and galvanizing, but watching that "gameplay" was outright repulsive and strangely and deeply uncomfortable. Hamish, I feel like you really took one for the team putting in the time playing that thing and putting together this video

[@orangeblaster500]

Watching footage of this game genuinely gave me existential anxiety. There's something profoundly wrong with what I am seeing.

[@SetariM]

Bruh if I could load up a game to play co-op with an AI because I have no friends or a gf, I would be so happy. I don't need an AI to make a game for me, I need an AI as a gaming partner IRL.

[@rd-um4sp]

"There is only so far that company can realistic push this" Are you sure there is a realistic limit they can push this?

[@noaag]

the limit is when cost exceeds revenue

[@TipsyAdonis]

The "there's only so far they can push this" argument has been made in regards to technology and engineering for over 60 years. It's more often than not been proved wrong. AI is very much in it's infancy, does this example seem pretty unwhelming? Yes. Will it get better? Undoubtedly.

[@StuHol-jb1hh]

@TipsyAdonis not ai stupid, it's just information regurgitation. It's square block in square hole ×100000^50000 times per second. This is not hard to understand.

[@machine.angel.777]

All of you would have eaten up AI Minecraft if it was called Dementiacraft and the soundtrack was EATEOT

[@araxiel2051]

This perfectly highlights why I always found "AI Art" an absolutely insane approach to it all. The fundamental problem with "AI" (and this is most apparent in image creation), is that AI doesn't know anything. While yes, technically it is all "2D" and any virtual environment in any software is literally an illusion generated on a 2D screen, we've gotten extremely good at simulating and calculating a near perfect illusion. And navigating those illusionary three dimensional spaces has become second nature both for people working on them, and people interacting/"viewing" them: As a player, it is completely natural for me to think "oh shit, there's a guy about a shotgun's range away from, I should move left", just as it is completely natural for one the VFX artists working on Mandalorian's CGI environment to be told "okay, move the camera slightly to the left and place another alien tree behind that rock over there" or a biochemist to rotate a 3D scan of a microscopic protein strand (or something like that). Generative "AI Art" is throwing all of that out the window. And that's why it always seemed effing insane to me. We have amazing digital tools where we can make a guy named "Francis" and have him be 1.8 meters tall, and we can place him 2 meters left of "Bill", and it works. And any person with a pencil can draw that perfectly fine too (even if just as stickmen). Cause we know/are told Francis is 1.8 meters tall, so a 2 meters distance is roughly "the height of a Francis sideways". Tell an AI model to do that, and it will completely shit the bed.

[@Cyynapse]

i think its great that people focus on AI as a labor exploitation issue (it is) but it can sometimes distract from the fact that AI is also inherently worse at most jobs than humans

[@Left4Cake]

I think a world without Objects Presences is a genuine fear of mine... And AI games have kinda confirmed it.

[@timmygilbert4102]

Remind me how early cgi was bad and had immense backlash 😂

[@opalharness1555]

My favorite thing about Oasis is that now i know what walking through hell would feel like.

[@octosalias5785]

AI was marketed as something to elevate us when of course it just empowers laziness. Its just going to be an ocean of shovelware.

[@DeepWeeb]

The way the entire enviroment morphs and changes just by staring at a wall for a brief second really makes it feel like a lucid dream about Minecraft

[@Hutorch]

The way the entire geometry of the world just shifts and changes must be like some of Lovecrafts characters felt when walking through places build by eldritch beings

[@TheOrian34]

See, the mistake was playing it like it was Minecraft. It's a great nightmare simulator where the world is trying to absorb you into a dissolved mass.

[@danielgrezda3339]

For a second my brain blacked out and I thought the footage was one of those fake anti piracy videos that turns the game into a horror show. Especially that "sheep" at 10:10 is terrifying.

[@localhearthian2387]

I don't know what the Oasis staff were smoking and at this point I'm too afraid to ask.

[@RobertA-hq3vz]

Its what playing Minecraft while high on LSD looks like.

[@LikaLaruku]

I TRIED playing it, because I like the idea of experiencing being stoned out of my gourd without actually doing any drugs or getting drunk. This is little more than an experience. You cannot build, you cannot save, you can barely make out what you're even seeing, the controls are terrible. The people on Reddit & Discord upvote the videos where the AI freaks out & fails, which is not really helping the "developers."

[@JMAssainatorz]

What i find super facinating is that this is essentially what happens in a dream. You have 0 object permanence so if you try to write something the next time you look at it the text will have changed and so will the screen you are looking at and all the details around it. Also on a side note. Ai is a tool good for specific tasks. it aint a one size fits all so use ai where it rly matters not for whole games but to compensate where programming gets too expensive to make. Fx. AI in strategy games. Its code its got 0 adapdability or a very limited response vocabulary. AI could add flexibility allowing the code to improvise and addapt or to spice up minecrafts biomes via costum generation. Mineshafts that are not hard locked to specific pregenerated tiles but generated much more seamlessly. Anything rly where variety matters encounters could be generated on the fly but at the cost of gameplay control.

[@onatgz]

can't wait to see ai reviewers talk about ai games kek

[@misterscottintheway]

I'm kind of surprised by how one dimensional your take is on this. This is a brand new technology and clearly not ready for consumers. It is being beta tested at scale and it will get better very quickly. We need to ask bigger questions because we don't have very long to laugh about the quality. Remember how bad ai videos were 18 months ago? Yes it's horrible but imagine a fully functional generative video game (which WILL exist within the next few years) and ask what it says about the world and about video games. That would be an interesting essay.

[@CreativeWM_Personal]

They need to use this tech for the long awaited LSD: Dream Simulator sequel, this randomness would work well for that experience

[@burnin8able]

I personally have nothing but vitriolic contempt for this style of large learning model ai for a number of reasons, but if there is ANY tiny sliver of a silver lining here it's that this garbled mess is probably the closest you could visually represent dream logic (as constrained by minecraft but the metaphor still holds.) If I were to describe a dream sequence in say a TTRPG to a player or write it in a piece of fiction, the level of shifting, melding, blurry, almost but not quite recognizable events happening to the subject would fit quite nicely.

[@jackiespaceman]

Finally I can play Minecraft on LSD without the LSD

[@Eltron92]

"that ghastly instrument *shudders* the....the.... SAXOPHONE."

[@fluffy_tail4365]

The most damning thing about AI minecraft is like all that ai right now, can only do recycle slop. In fact the more the task is complicated the harder for AI to make something that doesn´t feel like "been there, done that". We live already in an era where we had so much stuff we could get bored of the real deal, why would I ever pay for even more recycled slop?

[@gameworkerty]

3:48 Seems like Decart is putting Descartes before the horse

[@erikjohnson9112]

Oasis (AI Minecraft demo) is important for learning in the field, but useless to anyone playing games. It is almost like navigating a dream where object permanence is not a thing; out of sight, out of mind, out of existence.

[@grfrjiglstan]

This is exactly how a nightmare feels. It starts out in recognizable territory, things start shifting and morphing without your control, and it degenerates into nonsense and noise as you frantically try to assert some form of control.

[@Blear_Mind]

this is what it fells to sleep on antipsychotics

[@daniellion5291]

The way it morphs is exactly like how dreams seem to work. Its really uncanny and disturbing.

[@ShakeAlmighty]

i had to tab out and lissten to it audio only because the footage was making me feel sick (and i never get motion sickness in games).

[@officiallyanthony]

Yea this is dreadful However it's not a game, it's a public version of something that most companies wouldn't release ever At one point AI couldn't generate basic images properly, over time they got better and now it's so good it's nearly indistinguishable from genuine stuff It will happen with this, this is basic, this is simple, this isn't a finished product, it's a work in progress little thing some smart people made AI won't replace anything, but AI will get better than this

[@onlyyoucanstopevil9024]

This is tech demo not game

[@Matzu-Music]

What I found about AI MC is that I ended up playing it like a lucid dream.

[@KronoGarrett]

To put it simply, it's a game for shareholders.

[@jktomas]

I think a simple, Atari style game made in AI on the spot could actually be functional and pretty cool. Then they could improve that technology for years until they are capable of generating something 3d. I don't understand why they started from something so complex. Maybe to impress the investors who wouldn't be excited about Atari graphics.

[@mspeter97]

So, this tech has absolutely no future. It's catastrophic. BUT I found it oddly fascinating how close it is to how your brain does things when you dream.

[@Alienrun]

I've had some pretty wild dreams in my time, but I'm going to have to disagree with you here...because we're watching this when we're awake...we see all the flaws clear as day! This genuinely feels inhuman...its not just creepy and unsettling...its beyond that in a way that's hard to explain...

[@VVulf_chan]

Lots of AI videos remind me of bad trips on LSD.

[@eighthcircle8777]

Discussions like this always have me a bit conflicted, I don't support the adoption of technology like this to simply cut jobs or increase revenue only to ultimately leave people without any livelihood. And clearly that's what an investor or VC is hoping for. But oasis and projects like it are essentially just research projects. Which is clear by reading their blog and seeing that their work is provided openly to people in their particular community. There is nothing proprietary here, they are not trying trick anyone into playing or paying for AI Minecraft. It seems like you used their work to make a critique about something that they are not responsible for. What would you have them do, stop caring about their area of study? Stop seeking funding for their research? Clearly the answer isn't just make better AI games. They probably should turn down the hype, but if what you're saying at the end is true then it should work itself out. The tech reaches its Zenith and exists in some equilibrium with games as they are made now. People who don't care have their mass market games, just as they do now with AAA and people who do can play non-AI games. The fact that hype or automation can lead to job losses that result in individual people suffering seems like a systemic issue that needs to be tackled at a governmental level. Taxes on companies that do this should feed into a welfare system that countries use to sustain the quality of life of their citizens, so that they can choose to do things they enjoy with their time. It is the tech industry that causes this problem, but the tech industry is not equipped to solve it. Governments are though.

[@TheJolteonMaster]

The first minute & 4 seconds alone is already the best explanation for what “AI” is actually doing I’ve seen so far for real. The ease at which autocorrect is inadvertently trained to “correct” my correctly spelled words into my usual typos immediately comes to mind, applying such homogenization everywhere else is just… it’s indeed very different from how the original Minecraft or even the one flight-simulator’s graphics were programmed. Humans made computer generative technologies better, how hard billionaires are trying to simply take the humans out of the equation is very telling. I’m normally not a fan of sitting down and listening to entire rants on this subject, but this is one to watch from beginning to end. 👍 It goes in some super neat & unexpected directions, kudos.

[@Crocogator]

It's such a weird time. My experience with it had me trying to manipulate the AI. Once I knew what it was doing, I could wrestle with it and 'build' a house by looking around in certain ways. If this video learning can be combined with some kind of mechanics learning, we'll be seeing some WILD stuff. There's going to be an era of 'games' that are just LSD Dream Emulator turned to 100x.

[@orafaeldipietro]

After testing it, I Felt inside a psychodelic christopher nolan movie.

[@RootsThunder]

I'm a game dev and I enjoyed this project. I get it's shit as a game, but it is definitely impressive.

[@startrekmike]

How is it impressive?

[@RootsThunder]

@@startrekmike Takes skill to create this

[@TheEnmineer]

@@RootsThunder Well, it doesn't actually lol. That's the cool thing!

[@bigoafboulderbrain_]

What i don't understand is how this is meant to help develop games? There's no logic here, no hitboxes, no win condition. Imagine playing a game of call of duty where the round never ends and the players warp in and out of reality every frame with no hitboxes so it's impossible to hit a headshot. Not to mention that it cannot create new content, only derivative content.

[@kingszeno]

Made a blender script only with ai, it's scary impressive but thinking on it it still needs professionals to iron out anything and validate the result. We don't want app X, we want tools to build easier. We do still need rights for data management and hope that the industry will, if not be regulated, die down like crypto once they understand diminishing returns.

[@jayquoproductions]

That abomination cannot even be classified as game by definition

[@jamesgphillips91]

hot take... The people who over invest in ai in the wrong ways will put themselves out of business. Gaming will be fine, existing public companies in the space will die tho. Indie devs using local gen ai to aid workflows will catch up to triple A in the next few years.

[@thesidneychan]

AI in the hands of actual talented people is very different than if it was used by a pure prompter.

[@jonathan0berg]

@@thesidneychan I've found that while AI is fun, it's easy to hit a plateau in terms of skill increases, which has motivated me to practice some non-AI skills to try and fill the gaps created by the weaknesses of AI.

[@jamesgphillips91]

@@jonathan0berg soooo true. I was working a junior dev and using ai, got a lot done but stopped growing at a certain point. Still gotta learn stuff the old fashioned way if you want to master something, and mastery will always be noticeable.

[@jamesgphillips91]

@@thesidneychan totally agree, i think vcs are high asf in their own shit. Most of these companies aren’t profitable and will be gone soon. Local open source models are free if you have a gaming pc and I expect better tools to come out of that space that will supercharge small teams of passionate folx, solo devs, etc.

[@cla_bla]

Are we ever going to do something about Billionaires? Or are we going to let them take everything?

[@buriedstpatrick2294]

Machine learning (which is all that this "AI" stuff is) is extremely limited in what it can reasonably do. With time this will become more evident. Simple math problems like adding two numbers together requires an insane amount of training to become somewhat reliable. With a traditional algorithm it's one line of code. So is it really better to train a model to learn how to better guess an answer or just have something you can rely on 100% of the time? In the realm of games, video game systems work exactly because they are deterministic and follow strict logic. You learn from the game, not the other way around. Probabilistic algorithms have their place in games like, as you put, procedural generation and such. But the core systems must always work off of deterministic logic if you want to make a fun video game, and there's a reason "biomes" are a thing Minecraft to make the randomness more interesting. Getting these probabilistic models to resemble deterministic systems is such a huge waste of resources and time. They can, by definition, never be as good as the real thing (something made by a human).

[@1cynicalsaint]

Is this the Eternal Darkness sequel we've all been waiting for?

[@ElkiLG]

Ok I'll have to listen to this video because the gameplay makes me incredibly uncomfortable for some reason.

[@Blear_Mind]

because you don't have control over anything

[@JNJNRobin1337]

honestly? ai generated games wont be engineless. i Seriously doubt that. at most? still dependant on an engine, but able to generate each component live if necessary. the most benefit i can possibly think ai in games can give is better npc's and making those companies actually make dynamic worlds again

[@skootz24]

AI slop Minecraft could make a pretty sweet horror game, I think.

[@COLDCHEMICALpresents]

Brilliant piece! Some of your finest work to date, IMO.

[@redderthanmisty6762]

I think if AI videogames were to take off, it would more be a case of the developer only needing to create graphics to a very low, simplistic level, but then overlaying an AI model that takes in what the game engine renders, and creates something far more visually realistic, while not having to worry about problems such as object permenance, or non-euclidian geometry that comes with fully ai generated experiences.

[@dragonslayer3552]

6:42 "the worst game i have ever played" i agree and i cant put to words the amount of weight the word "worst" holds Also you called it a nightmare... Nah my most insane non sensical nightmare i have ever had had an actual cohesive plot and line of events that although a bit random they somewhat in some way made sense... This ? Nah this aint even close

[@MacSmithVideo]

I think you're being a little harsh towards the robots