Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after its first release, thanks to a unique blend of original gameplay and open-world building possibilities.

A counterfeit called Oasisreleased last month, captures much of the flavor of the original game with a remarkable, eerie twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that imagines each frame.

Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Deviation in collaboration with Severea company that designs custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of optimized hardware to power transformer-based AI algorithms.

Oasis uses a transformative AI model, similar to that which powers a large language model, trained only, apparently, on countless examples of people playing Minecraft, to imagine each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user inputs like clicks. or mouse movements. Oasis is similar to a video generation model like Sora except that a user can control its output.

You can play Oasis online for free, and it’s both fascinating and surreal to explore. In addition to hosting bizarre artifacts, like misshapen livestock and staircases that lead nowhere, the game features an incredible, Creation-like quality. Since each frame is generated based on what the AI ​​model imagines should follow the image it currently sees, the game world is never entirely stable and will happily shift and morph with a little flick inch. If you look too closely at a texture, such as when you raise your head, the blocky world in front of you may look completely different from the one you last saw.

It is also possible to upload your own image for Oasis to work with. I tried adding a photo of my cat, Leona, and the game turned it into a beautiful blocky landscape (unfortunately, she’s not a feline character in the game, but oh well…).

Oasis became a viral hit with people explore ways has get your AI engine hallucinate new environments. Sometimes it can even be tricked into teleporting you to a dark moonscape resembling The end from Minecraft. It’s telling that this generative AI project is not entirely original, but rather appears to be a bizarre imitation of the world’s most popular game (it was trained on an open source Minecraft dataset of OpenAI).

“People are trying to teleport to different worlds and run at full speed,” says Robert Wachen, director of operations at Etched. “That’s one of the main reasons it went viral.”

The AI ​​approach taken with Oasis is too inconsistent and uncontrollable to be useful in a conventional game, says Julien Togeliusprofessor of computer science at New York University. Generative AI has future potential to control game characters and perhaps generate scenes or worlds, he says, but it’s still early days. “It’s a very interesting and impressive technology, but at the moment it’s an answer in search of a question,” says Togelius.

Frank Lantzgame designer and director of the game design department at New York University, says Oasis seems to be caught in a sort of uncanny valley that prevents it from being truly fun to play. But he suggests that an enterprising young game designer might just find a way to make this one that people love. “It’s obviously cool and interesting,” he says.