With any luck, the ouroboros of plagiarism that is Generative AI will eat itself in the next few years – but until then, we're going to have to deal with uncanny six-fingered art and hours of YouTube slop. The next step in the Elon Musk cult's attempt to speedrun the death of art has come in the form of Oasis, a Minecraft clone being touted as the first AI-generated video game.
Etched, the Cupertino-based AI startup behind Oasis, has been unusually transparent about the "game", touting, among other things, the lack of any actual code. Every frame is generated by the Oasis AI model in real time based on the user's key and button inputs, meaning that it's kind of like playing Minecraft if the game itself had dementia. With no hardcoded mechanics and no capacity for memory, each frame only has the frame preceding it for reference, meaning that what starts as something resembling Minecraft invariably descends into a hazy hellscape where there are no rules and nothing is real. It's vaguely reminiscent of early art games like LSD Dream Simulator, but those actually had some degree of intentionality behind them.
Etched has boldly declared that "within a decade, [they] believe a majority of internet content will be AI-generated." (Isn't that a comforting thought?) If it's going to look like this, count me out. Generative AI has, thus far, only amounted to a jittering, uncanny imitation of human talent, and it's likely that its rampant energy consumption is going to burn out the planet before we reach the promised days of being able to generate triple-A games with a single button press. Oasis seems to fit right into that trend: spending vast amounts of money, manpower and energy to make a worse version of something we already had for no discernible purpose.
It's probably still better than the movie's going to be, though.
