Generative AI creates playable version of Doom game with no code

YourNetworkIsHaunted , 19 minutes ago

Note that the image here isn’t from the AI project, it’s from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I’ve seen closest to this one.

And when they say they’ve “run the game” they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

harsh3466 , 2 hours ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t there have to be a code layer somewhere in there?

It’s like all those “no code” platforms that just obscure away the actual coding via a gui and blocks/elements/whataver.

hasnt_seen_goonies , 1 hour ago

In this case, no. This is just interpreting what the next frame should be by the previous one. Like how the sora videos work, but with input.

Virkkunen , 1 hour ago

So then the code is to make the AI generate images and take input

CheeseNoodle , 2 hours ago

I really hope this doesn’t catch on, Games are already horifically inefficient, imagine if we started making them like this and a 4090 becomes the minnimum system requirement for goddamn DOOM.

SnotFlickerman , 3 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

An AI-generated recreation of the classic computer game Doom can be played normally despite having no computer code or graphics.

After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.

Why are we lying about this? Just because it happens in the AI “black box” doesn’t mean it’s not producing some kind of code in the background to make this work. They even admit that it “runs out of memory.” Huh, last I checked, you’d need to be running code to use memory. The AI itself is made of code! No computer code or graphics, my ass.

The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist.

Always a good look. /s

xionzui , 3 hours ago

I mean, yes, technically you build and run AI models using code. The point is there is no code defining the game logic or graphical rendering. It’s all statistical predictions of what should happen next in a game of doom by a neural network. The entirety of the game itself is learned weights within the model. Nobody coded any part of the actual game. No code was generated to run the game. It’s entirely represented within the model.

huginn , 1 hour ago

What they’ve done is flattened and encoded every aspect of the doom game into the model which lets you play a very limited amount just by traversing the latent space.

In a tiny and linear game like Doom that’s feasible… And a horrendous use of resources.

bamboo , 3 hours ago

“No code” programming has been a thing for a while, long before the LLM boom. Of course all the “no code” platforms generate some kind of code based on rules provided by the user, not fundamentally different from an interpreter. This is consistent with that established terminology.

Blue_Morpho , 2 hours ago

No code programming meant using a GUI to draw flowcharts that then creates running code. This is completely different.

cdf12345 , 2 hours ago

Maybe they should have specified , the Doom Source Code

Blue_Morpho , 2 hours ago

Imagine you are shown what Doom looks like, are told what the player does, and then you draw the frames of what you think it should look like. While your brain is a computation device, you aren’t explicitly running a program. You are guessing what the drawings should look like based on previous games of Doom that you have watched.