You wake up on a beach except it's a mountaintop it's underwater it's

November 3, 2024 2:31 AM

What if Minecraft except it's being generated in realtime and it's like those dreams where everything changes all the time and when you try to get close to a wall it becomes a fish. Oasis.
posted by signal (34 comments total)

Isn't this exactly the plot of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green?
posted by pjenks at 4:37 AM on November 3

Waiting for my turn.
posted by kinnakeet at 4:41 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

Saw someone describe this as Dementia Minecraft

It’s genuinely very unpleasant to look at and watch!
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:18 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

I too felt like dementia had taken hold. A trifle disturbing.
posted by CynicalKnight at 5:18 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

I was saying to myself, this doesn't feel AI-generated, everything just feels normal and stable, but then I discovered a slight depression that turned into a hole that turned into a cave that turned into a deep and infinite blackness. And now I am dead.
posted by mittens at 5:20 AM on November 3

The way that it depicts a version of Minecraft that occasionally completely violates the rules of Minecraft makes it both a dream simulator and a Dream simulator
posted by Merus at 5:32 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

AI. Is there nothing it can’t ruin?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:44 AM on November 3 [5 favorites]

Your call is important to us,
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:02 AM on November 3 [2 favorites]

Is there a YouTube link to what this looks like? I'm going to get sequentially distracted by eighteen things in the nine minutes it takes to get in. It's like looking up dimethicone on Wikipedia and finding yourself reading about Lhasa, Tibet.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:15 AM on November 3

There's a bunch of videos on the reddit thing.
posted by signal at 7:20 AM on November 3 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it's like if you were playing a minecraft but through DeepDream. I can see the through-line there.

Like DeepDream, I am intrigued by how similar the visuals and logic are to the things that my brain will do during dreaming or in certain other altered states.

Not for the first time I wish that Oliver Sacks were still alive so we could hear his take on this stuff.
posted by Horkus at 7:33 AM on November 3

YouTube link> The github page has some indicative jifs on it.
posted by BCMagee at 7:34 AM on November 3

Google Chrome only, if you're into that whole "death of the www" thing
posted by glonous keming at 8:13 AM on November 3 [2 favorites]

I was going to complain about the Chrome-only-osity too. I'd say it's the successor to 'best viewed with IE6 at 800x600', but at least those pages were still viewable in other circumstances.
posted by BCMagee at 9:10 AM on November 3 [2 favorites]

Maybe my computer is too crappy, but it ran so slow and the controls were so janky I gave up pretty quickly.

The concept is interesting, and I do wonder what the AI is doing. It almost looks like it's seen a lot of minecraft videos and is extrapolating each frame from the preceding ones. But that seems like it'd be really damn computationally expensive.
posted by sotonohito at 9:14 AM on November 3

This short article explains more what's going on with this. It's a tech demo of an approach to AI generated games. Never says explicitly but I think the game is running on some cloud system and streaming video to your computer, which explains some of the jankiness (and the waiting for your turn).

Top Reddit videos is a way to see some highlights.

I like it. It feels like genuine art to me, using the new medium of generative AI to create something novel and very much of its medium. Obviously it's borrowing heavily from Minecraft but the interesting part is the dreamlike manipulation of that, not that it's a bad Minecraft emulator. Not sure it makes a very good game but it's interesting.
posted by Nelson at 9:35 AM on November 3 [3 favorites]

If you gave this to someone when they were the right kind of high you could really fuck them up.
posted by lucidium at 10:19 AM on November 3 [2 favorites]

"Your screen can turn into a portal—into some imaginary world that doesn’t need to be coded, that can be changed on the fly. And that’s really what we’re trying to target here..."

Except Minecraft did need to be coded, for Decart to get this far. The millions of hours of Minecraft footage used to train this thing are the result of millions of hours of human effort, making Minecraft, making, maintaining, and administering Twitch and YouTube, playing Minecraft, etc.

So far, I've only watched videos of other people playing this. But evaluated in this light, as the result of millions of hours of human effort, it's not impressing me much. Plain old Minecraft is better (no surprise) and has actually been more efficient with human effort (What! But yes!).
posted by Western Infidels at 10:43 AM on November 3 [8 favorites]

What if Minecraft, except not a game, and it you burn down a rainforest to power it?

I cannot favorite Western Infidels hard enough. This is a sloppy reflection of minecraft, through a glass, darkly. This isn't the future of gaming, it's more hype for the AI bubble.

As a general rule, I don't want to yuck someone else's yum, but these AI slop videos hyping someone's startup dreams are really getting me down.
posted by chromecow at 10:54 AM on November 3 [3 favorites]

Follow-up: The "generated in Real time" is a red herring. In computer graphics, you can spend more rendering time to make a higher fidelity image. Giving this neural net more compute time will not result in a substantively more playable copy of Minecraft, just hallucinations with better visual fidelity.
posted by chromecow at 11:00 AM on November 3

DOOM looks better.
posted by credulous at 11:14 AM on November 3

I've played hundreds of hours of Minecraft, so I was willing to put four minutes into this. It was four interesting minutes, but that was all I needed. This isn't the future of gaming, it's a novelty, like watching a celebrity playing Minecraft, or Dior designing skins for it.

It is like a dream, in that the program, like your unconscious brain, does not have the permanent 3-D model you're led to expect it does. It can simulate moving forward into a persistent scene, but if you simply turn around, or just get so close to a wall that only a few blocks are visible, it totally forgets 'where you were'.

I kinda wish they'd simulated walking around the dog's-noses videos that were the state of the art ten years ago.
posted by zompist at 1:37 PM on November 3

Third about being annoyed that it's Chrome only. A web page that only supports one browser is, rightly speaking, not a web page. It's a Chrome page. At least it loads in Vivaldi.
posted by JHarris at 1:46 PM on November 3 [2 favorites]

The other thing about these diffusion games is, where image generation may have some kind of plausible deniability in terms of copyright violation (because it's "learning", and humans can "learn", and training on a bunch of stuff better hides the source material), if your training set is entirely a single game... well... then you're basically just copying a game and adding some weird randomization, right?

It is pretty crazy technology and in theory there might be some interesting uses in the future, but yeah...
posted by ropeladder at 5:09 PM on November 3

[CTRL] to run, it said. W to go forward, it said. And then my window closed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:26 PM on November 3 [1 favorite]

I bet people complained that Pong was a shitty version of a real game.

This runs for me OK on my Firefox mobile, fwiw
posted by rebent at 6:52 PM on November 3 [3 favorites]

This isn't table tennis vs Pong, it's Pong vs an objectively worse version of Pong.
posted by Reyturner at 7:17 PM on November 3 [1 favorite]

rebent, which platform are you running mobile Firefox on? Trying to run it on desktop Firefox, it prevents itself from even trying to run. Are you using an iOS platform? That might explain it, since "Firefox" there actually renders pages using Webkit-based Safarim which it's possible the site deigns to be close enough to Chrome to let it execute.
posted by JHarris at 11:05 PM on November 3

Jharris, on my android pixel 6a
posted by rebent at 12:23 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]

This is an amazing thing, like being able to peer into and control the dreams of a brain that has only ever experienced the universe as Minecraft. As with so many AI things, its value is more as a demo of what could one day be possible rather than an end product in and of itself. So this was trained on thousands of hours of Minecraft controller input and video output - so perhaps if you strapped on an exoskeleton that recorded leg movements and walked around a forest with a camera for a month you could create a photorealistic forest walking simulator AI, for people stuck in concrete jungles (most of the reason I played RDR2 so much during lockdown…) My disabled mum would love to be able to use something like that!
posted by bakerybob at 12:57 AM on November 4 [2 favorites]

In their blog post about it they refer to it as "the first playable AI model that generates open-world games."

But of course, there is the question, what is the point of "generating" Minecraft if you already have Minecraft? I think where they're misrepresenting it, is it's not generating games, it's generating game-flavoured video. It's not a new "game" just because there's a new map; Minecraft already had random maps.

With specialized chips like Sohu, we can run video models in high-definition, at playable frame-rates, and to many simultaneous users -- all requirements to unlock these new use cases at scale.

...

Video models run so poorly on GPUs because they are very compute-intensive. ... This is exactly the problem Sohu was designed to solve.

So I think the real reason this exists is to sell their AI chip. Though it looks like their chip doesn't actually exist yet and this demo isn't running on it:

we’d like to thank Decart for their collaboration on the project. Their inference engine was crucial to making Oasis real-time on GPUs, which you can try for yourself on our live demo.

Custom chips are pretty expensive up-front, so I guess this is a publicity stunt to try to get funding for their custom chip to actually get manufactured?
posted by RobotHero at 8:10 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]

MetaFilter: I don't want to yuck someone else's yum, but
posted by doctornemo at 11:33 AM on November 4 [1 favorite]

just think: as the technology progresses, one day you might even be able to play fully accurate Minecraft, on your computer
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:11 PM on November 4 [3 favorites]

@doctornemo, I deserved that.
posted by chromecow at 9:34 AM on November 5 [3 favorites]