Bad AI isn't good

Created 7 Nov 2024 3:12 PM

Enter the Oasis

Hey, look, I love a good bad movie. The Room is a famously awful piece of cinema, full of bizarre choices at every level, a hilarious piece all the funnier for how serious it thinks it's being, and I am here for that. But what we can't do is pretend that, because we can get that enjoyment from how bad it is, that it then is actually good, or is close to being good. It's fun, but it is still bad.

AI is bad.

(And, disclaimer; not all AI etc. There's a big difference between someone setting up a neural network to work on some specific task, and the kind of big tech this-will-solve-all-your-problem "AI" bullshit that's the more well know. I'm talking about the latter.)

But a chief strategy amongst those people tasked with selling it to us is to take the inherent flaws in it, the abject shittiness of it all, and tell us that that's the feature, the fact it can be so wrong is what's so good about it, and it's only going to get even better (meaning, paradoxically, both that it's good and will improve, and that it's bad and will stop being bad.) And that's bullshit.

Let's talk about Oasis.decart.ai.

Oasis is AI-generated Minecraft. You are dumped in a Minecraft world, and can move around, break blocks, manage your inventory etc etc, all functionally an AI-generated video being influenced by your inputs. And, look, on a basic level, it does feel slightly impressive, to be able to do all those Minecrafty things without actually running Minecraft. It just has two tiny, inter-related problems.

1. It's utterly terrible at being Minecraft

Look, all this system is doing is examining a screenshot of Minecraft, checking if the player is looking around or moving or clicking the mouse, and then generating a new screenshot that looks like what might happen if an actual player playing the actual game did that thing. And, sure, like I said, that is slightly impressive, but it means the system doesn't actually have any idea what's going on.

For example; the world is constantly changing around you. Turn around? The world changes. Look too closely at a block? The world changes. Get in an area where the terrain is too indistinct or repetitive? The world changes. The AI doesn't actually have any model of a world it's drawing from, so any time it's tasked with showing you something that wasn't already on screen, it just makes something up. Often, that thing won't even look like anything in Minecraft, at which point the AI will just assume you're seeing something indistinct in the distance (even if it's also clearly right next to you), and slowly morph it into something recognisable as you "move" "closer".

This extends to your inventory. Open the screen, close it, then come back later, and it's likely your items will have completely changed.. along with your character model. This even extends to things that never leave the screen; I notice the items in my toolbar kept slowly morphing, or tools disappearing or reappearing, because the AI doesn't actually know what you have, just that it should look a bit like it looked in the last few frames, and that tends to let it drift.

At one point, I faced a hill, rotated 180 degrees, and walked backwards. The game allowed me to do this, but devoid of any information to work from, it just generated a flat endless plain, extended further and further as I walked back without end. This is the true imagination of AI; non-existant.

Even putting all this aside, what the game does generate is nonsense. The environments are mishmash of weird terrain, with blocks and objects put around completely haphazardly. There's no concessions made to a fun, enjoyable world; it's only goal is to justify what was on screen before.

2. Minecraft exists.

Let's imagined a "fixed" version of this app. They've figured out how to keep the world around you persistent. Your inventory no longer changes when you're not looking it it. It runs faster, as fast as your computer allows, and at a much higher resolution. The world that generates is coherent, fun and wide. Maybe they add multiplayer so you can explore the world with your friends, and save them permanently to return to again and again.

...That's just Minecraft. That already exists.

They're using AI to create a faded shadow of a thing that already exists, with all of the societal, environmental and moral costs that entails.

Oh no, it was a mirage

The eventual promise of this is that we can have entire games that play out without actually making a game; if you can create a screenshot, the AI will figure out how it actually plays. But it's a false promise, like the idea that ChatGPT will suddenly stop making things up if they can just get more funding. This tech is only ever going to let you play vastly worse versions of things that already exist.

In the meantime, they play up the worth of the flaws. The fact this thing is garbage is a feature, actually, look how fun it is to play Minecraft in a world that is constantly shifting around you! Isn't it funny! Please pay us.

Please do not pay them. Not this company, nor anyone else that pushes how humorously bad their "AI" is as an interim stumbling block on the way to the perfection that they're definitely less than a year from, honest. Don't pay OpenAI, don't pay Tesla, don't pay anyone pushing this stuff.

Just go play Minecraft. It's fun. We can play together, if you want.