An AI that plays Minecraft for you got made, but it won't be released

pcgamer.com:

Microsoft has applied advanced AI towards a program that plays Minecraft in response to natural-language text prompts: Telling the character to dig, or build, would result in the character doing just that. The tech was demo'd internally to Microsoft employees, and was made using an AI other than Prometheus, the technology that Microsoft uses for its new Bing chat—developed by ChatGPT.

The development was reported by Semafor(opens in new tab), who got it from an internal source. The Minecraft-playing AI was made as an experiment of sorts, shown off as an internal demo. Either way, the thought of an AI capable of taking an input like «build a house» or «cut down a tree» and implementing it in Minecraft is pretty impressive stuff. (That's what Microsoft wanted to do as-of May last year(opens in new tab), and it seems like it at least partially succeeded.)

Semafor reports that Microsoft «has no immediate plans to include the feature in the public version of Minecraft.» That's not surprising, as past voice-control experiments in gaming have generally been failures—experiments implemented as gimmicks before the technology was truly ready.

Perhaps the most interesting possible application of the tech was pointed out by Kotaku(opens in new tab): A voice-controlled natural-language game may well be an accessibility option in the future. Despite remarkable advances in controls for people who can use neither keyboard nor mouse, such equipment can still be quite expensive. (Not to mention others for whom current tech isn't an option at all.)

Microsoft isn't the first to play with its crafting game as a place to train AI. OpenAI did so last year, and as far back as 2016(opens in new tab) a firm was using the game as a playground for