Real-Time Generative Media Is Closer Than We Think 🎥

Welcome back to the AI For Humans Newsletter!

This game isn’t real. Or more accurately, it’s generated one frame at a time based on your keyboard and mouse inputs.

No underlying game engine, just an AI model creating an image at a time. It’s called Oasis, and isn’t just a research paper, it’s live! You can play it yourself.

It’s hard to express how weird and, yes, revolutionary this idea really is — this game is using generative AI to make up what frame comes next. It’s literally predicting your next move and then generating the visuals and gameplay to match. It changes the entire idea of how we imagine video games being made in the future and don’t even get us started on the implications around simulation theory.

People have pointed out how the game is hallucinating next steps and that consistent rules with longer windows of memory are vital for actual video games, but let’s be clear… this is now very possible future for interactive entertainment and points to a world where ‘prompt-to-game’ is real.

All of this comes as game studios are starting to lean into AI-driven NPC experiences and even Netflix just appointed a VP of GenAI for Games. We expect this world to keep growing significantly over the next three to five years.

But the bigger question is… how much do people really want to define their own creative experiences? If you give a player endless creative control, a true open-world sandbox, will they create stuff that is meaningful? Will they even want to play that?

In our opinion, the most likely place this lands is some sort of blended world where game designers craft remarkable stories within structured worlds that that the player can customize and make their own.

Fortnite Creative Mode and the Unreal Editor for Fortnite are interesting starting points for this, as the rules of the game engine are consistent, but players can take the basics and make it their own. So it’s ironic then that Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games (the company that makes Fortnite) said everything about Oasis ‘sucks’.

One last pop culture touchstone for this… Black Mirror (always on the forefront of how technology might change our world) had a fantastic episode called “Joan Is Awful” about a hyper-personalized generative show based on one woman’s life.

Spoiler: It doesn’t end well for anyone.

Until next week,

-Gavin & Kevin

We 💛 This - Google Learn About

We’re still having a blast with Google’s NotebookLM podcast generations (you can even now steer those conversations with custom prompts), but Google’s recent LearnAbout launch is the coolest way we’ve seen to explore a new subject.

It’s free to play with, and is an innovative way to work with AI that breaks free of the chat box. Simply prompt it with a topic, and rather than having a chat back & forth it gives you a host of buttons and lists to tease out ways to learn more.