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Journalism of Courage
Water, earth, fire and air. Four elements that hold endless possibilities. Would you use them to make the Garden of Eden, or an extinction event that wipes out civilisation?
On ‘Infinite Craft’, players can do both. Launched on January 31, this browser game has grown to be a sleeper hit for its innovative use of Meta’s Llama2 language model to support ‘alchemy’, spurring endless memes and debates about the way it finds connections. We explain what the fuss is all about.
Infinite Craft is a generative puzzle game where you combine blocks to create new objects. Similar to 2010s classic ‘Little Alchemy’, you start off with four blocks of base elements, and drag and drop them to make resources like glass, stone, plants and rivers. But it doesn’t end there.
You can then go onto make more complex entities like people, places and fictional characters, or abstract concepts like love and suffering. If you’re a little famous, you could potentially make yourself, as YouTuber Jack Manifold has attempted:
The game uses neural networks to find conceptual ties between things, meaning there are multiple (and potentially, limitless) ways to reach the same outcome. Using this Wiki Wars-like ethos, players can test their hunches and creative skills to arrive at any conclusion—be it cool or questionable.
For instance, combining fire and lizard gives you a dragon. Love plus the Moon will give you a lunatic. Dragging ‘D’oh’ (a sound of regret from The Simpsons) onto icebergs will give you the Titanic. You can see where this is going.
Developer Neal Agarwal tells PC Gamer that the idea was to build an open-ended sandbox game where players could generate whatever they’d like, a la Frankenstein. There is no finish line to aim for, nor any concept of loss, as all your creations are saved in an inventory. If you manage to make something completely new, Infinite Craft tags it with ‘First Discovery’. I thought combining Haiku and Pompeii to make the groan-inducing ‘Poempeii’ would be a first, but alas, someone beat me to it.
“Every time someone tries to craft something novel, I ask Llama 2 with a prompt what the result should be,” explains Agarwal. Llama 2 is a family of large language models (LLMs), released by Meta last year for research or public use. Its license allows organizations with less than 700 million monthly active users to use it, making it practically (though not technically) open-source.
Llama 2’s training also used a massive dataset—ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters—which is what allows Infinite Craft its complexity in ‘finding connections’, i.e. making word associations via natural language processing. This dataset is not as comprehensive as closed-source models like GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini, though, which is why the game will not always make perfect sense. Absolute accuracy comes with the human touch, as on crossword puzzles.
There isn’t any filter to stop Infinite Craft from creating rude or politically incorrect associations either. You can generate 9/11, Osama Bin Laden and Adolf Hitler blocks on the game. Fans of black comedy have liked this freedom, arguing that human ideas of propriety can’t be applied on a word generator just ‘doing its job’.
Nevertheless, Infinite Craft sits on cushier moral ground than other AI generators like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, whose parent companies have been sued for ‘harvesting’ the copyrighted work of human artists to train their software. The game also heightens one’s respect for vocational trades, as you see every pain-staking resource that goes into making everyday objects. Writer Ursula K Le Guin once explained this well:
Players often hit a creative block when trying to build niche objects on Infinite Craft. This is because we end up using linear patterns of thinking for a non-linear game. Engineering-like logic won’t always work here, so for abstract or literary concepts, it’s best to use lateral thinking (aka, vibes).
For example, you could generate a colour block from flower pigments, but you could also generate it from a rainbow. The rainbow could come from rain, but also LGBT pride. If you want to make King Kong, add a tree to Godzilla. Llama 2 is able to recognise these kinds of referential leaps and close associations, as it knows words can be used in different contexts.
Accounting for scale also helps. Paper plus paper makes books. Multiple books make a library. Multiple plants make a garden, then a forest.
Another idea to shake things up is to speedrun Infinite Craft with friends. As you might know, we love the spirit of competition, and you can design your own by: a) two people trying to find the quickest way to a pre-decided block, or b) both players trying to make a ‘First Discovery’. Streamers are already trying this—YouTuber Will Neff hosted the first Infinite Craft Tournament last week, with veterans like Valkyrae, ConnorEatsPants, Ludwig and others joining in.
Hosted by Together AI, Infinite Craft is available on neal.fun. Like the Avatar, see how far you can bend the elements to your will!
