‘Minecraft’ Is Finally Haunted, Thanks To Generative AI

Minecraft has always been a blocky canvas for the human imagination; the game has inspired countless works of fiction, and many horror stories—now, AI has generated a haunted version of the game.

There is an incredible amount of Minecraft footage out there on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, which puts the game in a unique position to train a generative AI clone.

Hence, the inevitable arrival of “Oasis,” a playable, AI-generated version of Minecraft that has been trained on millions of hours of game footage.

How Does AI-Generated ‘Minecraft’ Work?

Oasis works via “next-frame prediction,” which uses that gargantuan amount of training data to predict the next frame that should appear in response to the player’s actions.

There is no game code here, no real rules; just an approximation of what should happen next, a machine’s memory of Minecraft.

Decart, the AI company behind Oasis, says that “Oasis takes in user keyboard and mouse input and generates real-time gameplay, internally simulating physics, game rules, and graphics.”

Players have posted videos of their experiences playing Oasis, revealing that the AI-generated Minecraft clone is completely incapable of maintaining the inner logic of the game.

Like many AI-generated creations, it is the mistakes, glitches and so-called “hallucinations” that really make it interesting.

AI-Generated ‘Minecraft’ Is Haunted

For as long as Minecraft has been around, the game has inspired urban legends about paranormal entities that supposedly dwell in the game, and strange experiences that can come from entering spaces where the player does not belong.

Thanks to the ever-unreliable nature of generative AI, Minecraft is finally haunted.

While testing Oasis, players have recorded themselves placing planks of wood, only to see the wood sprout out of the ground and assemble into a house.

The placement of objects is incredibly inconsistent, the flora and fauna mutate, and the world itself is unstable, often melting into another landscape entirely.

Players have been randomly transported into the clouds, into weird empty rooms, or shifted from green fields to snow-capped peaks.

Simply the act of changing direction in the game invites new scenery to sprout in unseen corners, with the new reality ready to reveal itself at a glance.

Oasis footage is like watching the dreams of a Minecraft-obsessed, iPad-addled toddler, a shapeshifting landscape with eerie entities that appear out of the blocks, only to melt away.

Commentators have dubbed it “dementia Minecraft,” and compared it to the Backrooms, an eerie, otherworldly space where one can wander for eternity, never finding the exit.

By nature, this version of Minecraft contains things that do not belong, that are simply not meant to appear in the game. This is a space where one could expect to encounter Minecraft supernatural entities like Herobrine, Giant Alex, or Entity 303.

Footage of gamers struggling to build simple structures, or watching elaborate builds conjured before their eyes, are like watching someone trapped in a cursed Minecraft that exists in purgatory, with players never able to see their efforts come together into something coherent.

Oasis Is A Glitchy Clone Of ‘Minecraft’

Like many generative AI projects, Oasis is a lesser echo of something that already exists. Not only does Oasis fail at being Minecraft, it is being presented as a step toward something more advanced—something like Minecraft.

The problem is, Minecraft is already pretty good at being Minecraft. We didn’t need an AI-generated version, but Oasis has at least presented something interesting, and fairly unique.

Oasis doesn’t seem like the future of gaming—it’s an absurdly resource-intensive way to recreate a glitchy clone of Minecraft that cannot keep track of what the player is doing.

It is surreal, and strangely compelling; it might even be called “art.”

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