Minecraft with object impermanence
I generally am uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing. But every once in a while there's a modern AI thing that's so glitchy and broken that it's strangely compelling. There's this generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else.
Trained on Minecraft with its huge randomly-generated landscape of punchable blocks, Oasis Minecraft will let you walk around.
The program was trained to predict the next frame of a game of Minecraft based on what appears to be a combination of the previous frame and whatever commands the user is sending. There's no underlying physics engine, no library of standard block or creature types and their properties, which means that things like half blocks and quarter blocks can exist. You can dig a hole exactly wide enough for yourself and then fail to fall into it, no matter how much you jump up and down over the opening. The blocks in the landscape are only approximations, and if you approach them they seem to shift and morph, attempting to look casual. I walked toward the torchlit area in the screenshot above, and there was a point at which the torchlit "stone" got too bright and texture-y, so it morphed into birch tree bark.
I managed to get a pretty good look at it trying to be birch tree bark in a wooden cave. Improbable, but it was going to try to go with that.
