In addition to the more technical updates I’m making to my AI course, I’m collecting some fun AI toys that could make for nice first-day activities to get discussion going or otherwise bring some levity to the course.
What Beats Rock? is easy fun. The game seems tuned to give you at least some benefit of the doubt that your chosen item will win that round of the battle. The generated explanations vary in how compelling they are. After a couple of rounds, much of the fun is not the AI but seeing if you can come up with a counterattack that nobody else has used before. The base game now seems to have a number of community variants, but classic What Beats Rock? still seems like the best.
AI Dungeon lets you cooperatively write an adventure story where you play the role of the protagonist choosing your actions. There are lots of pre-made scenarios (official and community designed) or you can do a quick start into a generic classic genre like fantasy, apocalyptic, or cyberpunk. The option to let the AI keep generating the story and choose when and how you want to jump in and add some direction is an interesting way to explore collaboration with a text generation tool.
Stretching the definition of “game” a bit, the JSTOR Daily Sleuth offers up a daily challenge to figure out which of five titles comes from an actual article written by a person and featured by JSTOR, versus the other four AI written titles. You can just make a guess (and get hints each time you guess wrong) or do some sleuthing to make sure you’re getting the right answer.
On the most serious end of the spectrum, The Prompt Airlines AI Security Challenge asks you to prompt engineering your way into convincing an airline chatbot to give you a free flight. Beating this involves some background research into prompt injection techniques.