Bot or Not

What is this?

Bot or Not is a short browser game about the gap between human and machine writing.

You will read ten quotes. Five were written by humans. Five were generated by AI. Your job is to guess which is which.

It sounds simple. Most people score close to a coin flip.

How to play

Each round shows you a single quote. Press **Human** or **Bot** (or use the keyboard: H or B). After each guess, you will see:

• Whether you were right or wrong
• Who wrote it (or which AI model generated it, and the prompt used)
• A short reflection on what made that quote hard to place

Those reflections are the point. The score is secondary.

Why does this exist?

AI-generated text is not obviously bad. That is the problem. The quotes in this game were chosen because they sit in the uncomfortable middle ground where human and machine writing overlap.

The game does not teach you a detection method. There is no reliable trick for spotting AI text, despite what some people claim. Instead, it asks you to slow down, read carefully, and notice what you are actually responding to when you read.

This is a Slow AI project. Slow AI is a newsletter and curriculum about critical AI literacy: knowing when to use AI and when to leave it alone. Bot or Not is one small exercise in that larger practice.

What makes it different

Most 'AI or human' quizzes give you a score and send you on your way. Bot or Not gives you a reflection after every single guess. Each reflection examines what made that particular quote deceptive: the rhetorical pattern, the borrowed metaphor, the missing specificity, the performed intimacy.

The teaching happens between the guesses, not at the end.

Credits

Design and concept: Sam Illingworth

Built for: Slow AI

Human quotes are attributed to their original authors with verified sources. AI quotes were generated using Claude Opus 4.6 with the prompts shown in game.

Find out more

theslowai.substack.com