The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist. According to their paper on the research, the AI can be played for up to 20 seconds while retaining all the features of the original, such as scores, ammunition levels and map layouts. Players can attack enemies, open doors and interact with the environment as usual.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
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.