I generally am uninterested in generative AI that’s too close to the real thing. But every once in a while there’s a modern AI thing that’s so glitchy and broken that it’s strangely compelling. There’s this generative AI knockoff of Minecraft that fails so hard at being Minecraft that it becomes something else.

Trained on Minecraft with its huge randomly-generated landscape of punchable blocks, Oasis Minecraft will let you walk around.

But there’s no object permanence. Look at a mountain, look away, and look back at it, and the mountain’s completely gone.

I found myself in this wooden cavern (which I did not build; I just came across it like a natural formation):

I walked up to the wall, backed up, and now I was here against the side of a mountain instead.

Build a structure, fail to maintain it in direct view at all times, and it’s gone the next time you look around.

The program was trained to predict the next frame of a game of Minecraft based on what appears to be a combination of the previous frame and whatever commands the user is sending. There’s no underlying physics engine, no library of standard block or creature types and their properties, which means that things like half blocks and quarter blocks can exist. You can dig a hole exactly wide enough for yourself and then fail to fall into it, no matter how much you jump up and down over the opening. The blocks in the landscape are only approximations, and if you approach them they seem to shift and morph, attempting to look casual. I walked toward the torchlit area in the screenshot above, and there was a point at which the torchlit “stone” got too bright and texture-y, so it morphed into birch tree bark.

I managed to get a pretty good look at it trying to be birch tree bark in a wooden cave. Improbable, but it was going to try to go with that.

Then I looked up too closely and steeply at the birch bark, losing track of the surrounding cave, and in a couple of chaotic frames…

The birch bark wall became snowy floor.

No wait, desert.

Liked that natural wooden cavern? Too bad, it’s gone forever. You live in the desert now.

You can sometimes catch glimpses of rare blocks, like lava or pigs, but they tend to turn into ordinary dirt or sand when you approach.

On the other hand, if you stare fixedly at ordinary blocks and approach them, they tend to get weird. Noise in a generative algorithm usually comes in the form of strong striped patterns, so by continually staring in the same direction you force the “Minecraft” algorithm to keep generating new frames based on accumulating noise. A somewhat ordinary stone cliff face gradually loses what definition it has, becoming blocky and flat as it seems to panic.

At another point, I jumped into this ordinary bush, which became a deep, dark forest.

I’ve made it a goal to see how completely I can get the generated landscape to freak out. One time I was swimming across a lake and noticed that the reflections at the water’s edge were looking weirdly spiky.

Swimming closer to them, they started to get even more strongly striped. Was this still supposed to be the horizon? Why did the rest of the water turn featureless? Why did the snowy mountain turn into trees? Was I even above water any more?

I swam closer and the water’s edge became a weird static wall that engulfed the sun.

Then there was rather a lot of static for a while.

I wondered if I would be stuck here forever, but the static calmed into something that looked like snow. The AI even hopefully outlined a block as if it was something real that I might be able to dig into.

When I looked up from the snowy floor, I was in a weird cave filled with desert plants.

I thought at this point I would be back to normal gameplay, but something about this landscape was still incredibly unstable and shortly I was looking at two suns through yellow and green jell-o?

Things were very blocky and bright for several seconds but eventually resolved themselves into an ordinary desert landscape.

Chaos persisted, in the form of the desert frequently turning into nat