About Bot or Bard

Bot or Bard is a small reading game. You get a short fiction passage and guess whether a machine or a person wrote it. That’s it.

The AI passages are written by a language model — no author, no published source, just a prompt and a genre. Some are raw first drafts; others are run through editing recipes. (This game is made by someone who builds AI tools for authors, in case that’s your kind of thing — but the game doesn’t need you to care.)

The human passages are public-domain prose — brisk old adventure and science-fiction writing that still reads well — plus pieces submitted by living writers. If you write, add a passage of your own and see if readers can tell.

The AI passages are written to match the human ones in genre and register — old-fashioned adventure, fantasy, and science fiction — so the game is about prose, not subject matter. It’s an imperfect test, and the submission pool keeps sharpening it.

The Lab. Each AI passage is tagged with the drafting recipe that produced it — a raw first draft, an edited draft, a persona-driven draft. Every guess quietly measures which recipe passes as human most often. You can watch the running results in the Lab.