If it has a screen, it can run Doom. This manta has encouraged people to run Doom on all manners of devices, from Def Con badges to lawnmowers. Now, the trend continues, as researchers from Google have gotten a playable version of the classic FPS running within an AI image generator.

Researchers get Doom running on Stable Diffusion

As spotted by Tom's Hardware, this project was developed by several researchers under the name GameNGen. The researchers created AI agents to play many games of Doom, rewarding them when they got pickups and killed enemies and punishing them if they got hurt or died. The researchers could then feed lots of gameplay into a Stable Diffusion model, which "memorized" what the levels looked like, where the enemies spawned, and how the game works.

Once the training had been completed, people could play Doom via Stable Diffusion. The player could give the model inputs, and the AI image generation model would remember what that action meant in terms of the game and replicate them as AI images. This includes fighting demons, with Stable Diffusion simulating both taking out monsters and taking damage from them.

The researchers claim that "human raters are only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the simulation," but eagle-eyed Doom fans will see some weirdness with the AI version of the game. For example, the AI has a tough time representing the ammo count at the bottom right, with the numbers morphing into one another regularly. Also, Doom Guy's portrait either jitters uncontrollably or locks itself into one face for long periods. However, it's still an impressive feat to get a playable version of Doom running on an AI image generation mode.

If you'd like to make some AI images yourself, be sure to check out the best AI image generators out there.