This Is Doom Running on a Diffusion Model

You’ve probably seen some version of the video below hundreds of times. Maybe it was a smart toothbrush display, an Ikea lamp, or a Roomba.

Doom’s E1M1 - The Hanger, the iconic first person shooter’s first level, is often used to showcase how the open source game can run on almost any device you can think of. The video below is novel not because of what device it's running on, but how it's running at all. What you’re looking at is not the Doom game engine, but a diffusion model, a type of generative AI model most commonly used to generate media, that’s responding to player input in real time.