botsbotsbots casts you as a hacker trying to break into a corporation, but to do so, you’ll need to avoid detection from its AI employees.
You’ve already been detected to some extent as soon as you start the game. What do you do now? You have to write a few words about several prompts that the system gives you. You can write pretty much anything you like as a response, but if you sound a bit too human to the system, you get the boot in a hurry. Thankfully the other bots often answer first, so you can take a look at what they said in response to the question and try to come up with something that takes on a similar tone or uses language that feels about right.
I figured this would be pretty easy. I write so many business-style emails every day that I feel I’m an expert on writing professional, robotic-sounding messages. But then the game hit me with a prompt asking me to write from the perspective of a spoon feeling left behind compared to the knives and forks in the drawer. I had no idea what sort of response an AI would give to that prompt, so I just winged it a bit and wrote something short that bore similarities to what the other AIs wrote. I failed the first time due to the simplicity of what I wrote, but managed to skirt by the second round. I added some more detail that time, but I was convinced this version was even worse.
Somehow I got by, but things only get more challenging from here in botsbotsbots. I felt like I was never sure how to sound like a robot to these bots, taking information from what they were saying and cobbling it together in some semblance of order. Which I guess is pretty much what most generative AI does, so perhaps the game DID teach me how to think like an AI while running me through a bit of a tense puzzle game.
botsbotsbots is playable now on itch.io.
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