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 spooky version of the game.

There is an incredible amount Minecraft footage available on YouTube and other video sharing platforms, putting 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 trained on millions of hours of game footage.

How does AI-generated ‘Minecraft’ work?

Oasis works via ‘next-frame prediction’, using that massive 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 Minecraft.

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

Players have posted videos of their experiences playing Oasis, showing the AI ​​being generated Minecraft clone is completely unable to maintain the inner logic of the game.

As with many AI-generated creations, it’s the errors, glitches and so-called ‘hallucinations’ that make it really interesting.

AI-generated ‘Minecraft’ is haunted

As long as Minecraft exists, the game has inspired urban legends about paranormal entities supposedly present in the game, and strange experiences that can result from entering spaces where the player does not belong.

Thanks to the increasingly unreliable nature of generative AI, Minecraft is finally spooky.

While testing Oasis, players recorded themselves placing planks of wood, then watching the wood sprout from the ground and form into a house.

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

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

The mere act of changing directions in the game invites the emergence of new landscapes in invisible corners, with the new reality ready to reveal itself at a glance.

Oasis images are like watching the dreams of one Minecraft-obsessed, iPad-addicted toddler, a shape-shifting landscape with creepy entities emerging from the blocks, only to melt away.

Commentators have called it “dementia.” Minecraft”, and compared it to the Backrooms, a creepy, alien space where you can wander for eternity without finding the exit.

By nature this version of Minecraft contains things that don’t belong, that simply aren’t meant to appear in the game. This is a space where you might expect a meeting Minecraft supernatural entities such as Herobrine, Giant Alex or Entity 303.

Images of gamers struggling to build simple structures, or watching complex contraptions conjured up before their eyes, are like watching someone trapped in a cursed Minecraft that exists in purgatory, where players can never see their efforts coming 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. It’s not just that Oasis fails at being Minecraftit is presented as a step towards something more advanced, something like Minecraft.

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

Oasis doesn’t seem like the future of gaming; it’s an absurdly resource-intensive way to create a glitchy clone of Minecraft who can’t keep up with what the player is doing.

It’s surreal and strangely compelling; it could even be called ‘art’.

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