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 andMinecraft, with resolution and framerate more characteristic of Nintendo 64 games likeOcarina of Time(20 FPS, 360p) than any modern port ofMinecraft.
Even fan ports to platforms like theGameCube and Dreamcastrun 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-sourceMinecrafttraining dataset from OpenAI, Minecraft Video PreTraining (VPT). VPT was trained on 70 thousand hours of IDM-labeled online video.
1/ We are excited to introduce Oasis, the world’s first real-time AI world model, developed in collaboration with @Etched. Imagine a video game entirely generated by AI, or a video you’re able to interact with—constantly rendered at 20 fps, in real-time, with zero latency pic.twitter.com/WAJFRyfTzSOctober 31, 2024
While AI zealots cheer advancements likeAI Counter-Strike: GO andDoomas 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 ofAngry Birds assembled from AI-generatedassets. That is still justAngry 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 themfeellike hallucinations to play.
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Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.
