AI-powered Minecraft runs without a game engine — game rendered in real-time at a continuous 20 FPS

In the “apparently” post-copyright age of AI PCs, yet another AI company has introduced a shameless playable ripoff of an actual, copyrighted video game— now it’s DecartAI’s Oasis world model and Minecraft, with resolution and framerate more characteristic of Nintendo 64 games like Ocarina of Time (20 FPS, 360p) than any modern port of Minecraft.

Even fan ports to platforms like the GameCube and Dreamcast run better than this! Add numerous AI hallucinations that render truly complex gameplay unfeasible, including a complete lack of object permanence to the point that even digging a hole drops you back above ground, and NO environmental fixtures are permanent, and one wonders why anyone would want to play a survival-building RPG in these conditions.

Oasis, developed in collaboration with Etched, isn’t necessarily commercial. In fact, according to comments on Etched Twitter, it’s apparently due to be open-sourced. How exactly they’re being allowed to open source and distribute code so blatantly ripping off (and training with) an existing video game is anybody’s guess.

This project is also based on the open-source Minecraft training dataset from OpenAI, Minecraft Video PreTraining (VPT). VPT was trained on 70 thousand hours of IDM-labeled online video.

While AI zealots cheer advancements like AI Counter-Strike: GO and Doom as advancements for the gaming space, it seems clear to anybody paying attention that the most affordable, performant, and sensible option for years, if not decades, to come will be actual game engines running on actual hardware.

Proudly touting a “game” without a game engine, game logic, or code is perhaps missing the point of what makes games fun—or even coherent, particularly considering the fact that these projects simply don’t exist without real video games to rip off.

In other words, no— with how this technology works fundamentally, requiring training off existing content, you aren’t able to simply AI prompt the creation of a truly complex, original game. The closest thing to that is a shameless ripoff of Angry Birds assembled from AI-generated assets. That is still just Angry Birds, though it is a remarkably more coherent experience than these real-time 3D AI world models, which are so prone to disorienting hallucination as to make them feel like hallucinations to play.