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Comment by ToValueFunfetti | Hacker News Reader

I find I'm willing to explore a minecraft world or puzzle through a nethack dungeon that nobody bothered to create. You could argue that humans made the biomes or defined the layout constraints, but humans also supplied the training data for an LLM. I guess it comes down to whether the art is any good, with procedural generation being mostly irrelevant? But perhaps a book is different

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I don't think I'd want to read a novel that was generated by an algorithm, but I might be up for a Choose Your Own Adventure style game, which might be a better analogy to Minecraft or nethack.

I mean the difference with Minecraft is each part that is procedurally generated was made by a human or involved human input into the design decisions.

Unless you are suggesting Notch was a generative AI model he made Minecraft.

What? That's not true at all, sans structures. Minecraft worlds are infinite and unique, using randomly generated noise textures as the basis. Nobody "made" each "part".

And arguing that a human tweaking noise parameters is somehow more creative than humans distilling their entire knowledge and cultural repertoire into a machine, then working with that to produce literature with a guided hand seems quite silly.

But someone did design a diamond block and a grass block and program their properties and model them and add them to the procedural generation system with rules on how they should be placed.

An LLM would from whole cloth create a block, how it works, and how it would be randomly generated. That’s why the current MinecraftGPT doesn’t have any consistency if you turn around in 360 degrees. Everything is being generated on the fly and how it works. Once you generate that Minecraft world, how it works and what it looks like is static and why it works the way it works was designed entirely by people.

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