Researches use A.I. to craft rather wonky Super Mario Bros. levels

As we’ve seen in recent months, artificial intelligence is being used to generate art based on the works of real-life people who’ve dedicated themselves to honing their crafts. Now that same approach is being used to take what Nintendo has spent decades perfecting in order to crank out something supposedly similar in minutes.

The gang at tech company Virtuals Protocol have put together a text-to-video AI model that they’re calling MarioVGG, and with a little bit of text, the program can spit out video footage that aims to mimic the design and flow of Super Mario Bros. gameplay. This was achieved by feeding the A.I. over 700k images of Super Mario Bros. on the NES.

MarioVGG analyzed the frames to figure out what jumping, running, and more were, and then eventually cobbled together an amalgamation of what it learned. This essentially lets the A.I. cook up an infinite amount of Super Mario Bros. worlds with just a few words of text, rather than the hours of programming Nintendo originally put into the title.

While the results are interesting without a doubt, what’s spit out is still a far cry from a fully-playable level. There are still all sorts of bugs and issues in the A.I.-created stages, and the program creates content based on the commands of “run right” and “run right and jump”. Along with that, MarioVGG was spitting out six-frame video sequences in six seconds. In other words, this A.I. is a very long way off from building levels that would actually play correctly.

If you want to see what MarioVGG actually came up with in action, you can take a look at the video below.