LogInSame thing as the legendary sandbox, but worse in every aspect.
Ever since AI developers began taking over the internet in mid-2022, we've seen countless instances of various generative artificial intelligence models infringing on all kinds of intellectual property, including movies, video games, news articles, and even musical scores, often getting away with absolutely irredeemable copyright violations by exploiting the legal gray area that AI currently occupies.
Sadly, this "gray area" doesn't seem to be going anywhere, as no matter how many lawsuits are filed each month against major AI players like OpenAI and Midjourney, outrageous cases of generative plagiarism still happen on a regular basis.
The latest such case was brought to us by Eteched and Decart, two AI startups you and I probably have never heard about, which celebrated Halloween 2024 by presenting Oasis, an interactive real-time world model described by its creators as "the first playable AI-generated game".
Without going too in-depth on how the model works – since giving generative AI any more credit or exposure than it deserves is the last thing on my list – here's the basic idea. In layman's terms, Oasis is a game-like experience made without an engine or a single line of code. Instead, it uses diffusion transformers to analyze user keyboard input in real-time and generate gameplay elements like physics, lighting, inventory, objects, game rules, and graphics accordingly, allowing players to move around and interact with the world.
Here are a few demos shared by the devs showing how it looks:
The most observant of our readers might have already noticed a small little detail about Oasis, a caveat that only the most eagle-eyed OSINT enthusiasts would catch – it's basically a 1-to-1 copy of Mojang's Minecraft.
And those readers would be right. Essentially, the "first AI-generated game" is nothing more than blatant plagiarism of everyone's favorite sandbox, trained on thousands of hours of Minecraft gameplay and recordings of corresponding user actions, which resulted in a nearly identical, but worse in every aspect, "game" with a similar visual style, UI, gameplay mechanics, fonts, visual effects, animations, and so on.
One thing that doesn't exist in the original Minecraft but is front and center in Oasis is, of course, AI hallucinations. Those who have tried it confirm that the experience is incredibly unstable, with environments often morphing into something else when not in the player's direct line of sight, making the "first AI-generated game" a proof of concept at best, something that its creators, to their credit, openly admit, describing the current iteration of Oasis as a "technical demo."
As flagrant as this copying is, the most mind-boggling part is that Minecraft is not mentioned once by the developers in their tech papers and announcements. At the moment of writing, the very word "Minecraft" is nowhere to be found in Eteched's statement, Decart's statement, the project's full technical report, or its GitHub page, and while the resemblance is too obvious and Minecraft is a wee bit too iconic to be an enigma for anyone, the fact that the original game's name isn't credited anywhere is, at the very least, suspicious.
The developers themselves view Oasis as a stepping stone toward a future where AI-generated games are commonplace, saying that "this research is only the beginning of a new journey involving more complex foundation models that enable real-time human-AI interaction on a new level." Given that this project wouldn't have been possible without countless video recordings of an already existing game, this perspective on the future is certainly subject to scrutiny, however, as always, it's impossible to predict how it will all turn out in the end.
And what do you think about Oasis, is it an exciting technological advancement, a sign of things to come, an outrageous copyright infringement, or something in between? Share your thoughts down in the comments!
Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.