LifeSim
Play

Updated October 31, 2026

The Human or AI Game

What the Human or Not game was, what AI21 found in 2 million chats, where to play a human or AI game in 2026, and tips to spot a bot.

Lifesim, Inc.

What is the “Human or Not” game?

“Human or Not?” is a chat game from AI21 Labs, an AI company. You chat with a stranger for two minutes. Then you guess: was the stranger a human or an AI bot?

AI21 Labs launched the game in mid-April 2023 as a social experiment. AI21 calls it the largest Turing test to date. By May 9, 2023, more than 2 million people had played more than 15 million conversations, AI21 says.

Each game paired you with one partner. The partner was another player or a bot. The bots ran on large language models such as Jurassic-2, from AI21, and GPT-4. Each bot had a persona with a name, an age, a job and a home town, the AI21 paper says.

The rules of the chat

The paper by the AI21 team gives the rules. The chat goes in turns, so no player can send two messages in a row. A message has 100 characters maximum. You have 20 seconds to send it. The chat stops after 2 minutes, usually after 4 or 5 messages from each side.

You read this on the LifeSim blog. LifeSim is our game, and it has AI people in it. But LifeSim is not a guessing game. We explain the difference below, and we say where a guessing game is the better pick.

What were the results of Human or Not?

Players guessed right 68% of the time. So about one guess in three was wrong. AI21 based these numbers on the first 2 million conversations.

Who the partner wasPlayers guessed right
A human73%
An AI bot60%
All games68%

The bot result is the important one. When the partner was a bot, players found it only 60% of the time. The AI21 paper calls that number close to chance.

The results by country, age and gender

Of the top countries, players in France guessed best, at 71.3%. Players in India guessed worst, at 63.5%. Women guessed right a little more often than men. Younger players guessed right a little more often than older players.

The two counts of players

The two AI21 sources give different counts. The blog post of May 9, 2023 says more than 2 million players. The paper of May 31, 2023 gives smaller counts. It says more than 1.5 million players and 10 million conversations in the first month. The 68%, 73% and 60% results are the same in both.

Is Human or Not still online?

The original AI21 game is not online in 2026. We opened humanornot.ai on October 31, 2026. The address sends you to the AI21 home page, and that page has no game on it.

A different team runs a game with the same rules at humanornot.so. The site is live. It has a “Start Game” button and a two-minute chat. You can play without an account. The About page says that Oleg (programming) and Kate (design) made it. The site does not say that it is part of AI21.

On Product Hunt, the maker of humanornot.so says that the original was “a limited time research” project. The maker says the team found the game after it closed and built a new version from the start. The listing gives 2024 as the launch year.

What about “Human or Not 2”?

Some app directories use the name “Human or Not 2”. We searched for an official site with that name and did not find one. The live game that we could open is humanornot.so, and its own pages say “Human or Not?”, not “Human or Not 2”.

What games are like Human or Not?

Two chat games and a few image quizzes use the same idea. You guess if a human or an AI made something. We opened each one on October 31, 2026.

Turing Test Live: one human, one AI, at the same time

Turing Test Live, at turingtest.live, is the site of the UC San Diego study below. You are the interrogator. You chat with two witnesses at the same time. One is a human and one is an AI. At the end, the site shows who was who. Cameron Jones runs it. When we opened it, the page also showed a “disconnected” error, so the chat may not always work.

Human or Not? at humanornot.so

This is the closest game to the original: one partner, two minutes, one guess. An optional account adds a leaderboard and saved stats.

Image quizzes: real or AI?

  • Which Face Is Real? shows two faces. You click the real one. Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington made it. The fake face comes from StyleGAN.
  • WhichOneIsReal has rounds with faces, animals, paintings, food, videos and text. The face quiz is free with no signup. The site says it is not part of the University of Washington project.
  • The AI or not quiz by Hany Farid shows 24 faces. Eight are real, eight come from a GAN, and eight come from a text-to-image model. You pick the eight real ones.

For games where the AI is the point, not a trick, read our list of AI games.

How can you tell if you are talking to a human or an AI?

No single test works. The AI21 paper shows that rude language and requests that an AI refuses were the clearest signs of a human. Typos were not a good sign.

What the AI21 data shows

  • Do not trust typos. The bots made typos and used slang on purpose. In chats where a player talked about spelling, players found the bot only 54.7% of the time.
  • Rude language points to a human. Players who used rude language were seen as human 86.7% of the time.
  • Requests that an AI refuses point to a human. Players who made such requests were seen as human 85.1% of the time.
  • Personal questions do not help much. The bots had personas and answered well. Questions about wars and conflicts in the news were an exception: players found the bot 68% of the time.
  • Ask about the screen. Some players asked about the game itself, for example the time left on the timer. A text-only AI does not see the screen, the paper says.
  • Do not act like a bot. Some humans wrote “As an AI language model” as a joke. Their partners still saw them as human 75.3% of the time.

Tips from the humanornot.so blog

  • Ask a follow-up question. One question gives one clue, and a follow-up shows a pattern.
  • Check if the partner builds on what was said before. A failure to do this is a clue.
  • Skip “Are you AI?”, math, trivia and spelling checks. The blog calls them weak tests.
  • Look for a group of signs. One sign means “maybe”, and several signs mean “likely”.
  • Remember that shy people, fast typists and people who write in a second language can look like bots.

These tips help in a game. They do not prove anything outside a game. The UC San Diego study below shows why.

Has an AI passed the Turing test?

Yes, in one study. In 2025, researchers at UC San Diego found that GPT-4.5 was picked as the human 73% of the time. That is more often than the real humans.

What the Turing test is

Alan Turing described the test in 1950, in the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. He called it the “imitation game”. A judge asks questions in text, and the machine tries to pass as a human. Turing predicted that an average judge would not have “more than 70% chance” of a right guess after five minutes, in about fifty years.

The UC San Diego study

Cameron Jones and Benjamin Bergen put the paper on arXiv on March 31, 2025. The UC San Diego news story of May 19, 2026 says that the journal PNAS published it. The test had three parties. A judge chatted with a human and an AI at the same time for five minutes. Then the judge picked the human.

AIPicked as the human
GPT-4.5, with a human persona73%
LLaMa-3.1-405B, with a human persona56%
ELIZA, a chatbot from the 1960s23%
GPT-4o21%

The persona prompt made the difference. Without it, GPT-4.5 fell to 36% and LLaMa-3.1 fell to 38%. The judges looked at tone, humor and small mistakes more than at knowledge, the news story says.

How this compares with Human or Not

Human or Not used two minutes and one partner. The UC San Diego test used five minutes and two partners. The AI21 team says their test is not a fully fair match with the test that Turing described.

Is there a game where you know the people are AI and you just talk to them?

Yes. In LifeSim, our game, the people are AI characters, and you know it from the start. There is nothing to guess.

Human or Not asks one question: human or bot? LifeSim asks a different question: what life do you want to live? You pick any city on a 3D map of the real Earth. The population of that city has jobs, homes and friends. You talk to the people in your own words, and they remember you. You live one life, a day at a time.

LifeSim is free to play, with no ads, no subscription and nothing to buy. It plays in a web browser at play.lifesim.com and in an iPhone app. Learn how to play or read what LifeSim is.

Where a guessing game wins

LifeSim does not test you. Do you want a score and a two-minute round? Play humanornot.so or Turing Test Live. If you want a picture quiz, try the Which Face Is Real? site. LifeSim fits if you want to talk to AI people for a long time, not to catch them.

For more games of this type, read games where you can talk to AI and our guide to AI roleplay.

Questions

Who made the Human or Not game?

AI21 Labs made the original game in April 2023. A different team now runs a version at humanornot.so.

How long is a Human or Not chat?

Two minutes. In the original, each message had 100 characters maximum and 20 seconds to send.

What percent of people can tell a human from an AI?

In Human or Not, players guessed right 68% of the time. With a bot partner, they guessed right 60% of the time.

Is Human or Not free?

We found no price on humanornot.so. You can play without an account.

Did GPT-4.5 pass the Turing test?

In the UC San Diego study, judges picked GPT-4.5 as the human 73% of the time. It needed a human persona prompt to do this.

Are the AI characters in a game the same as the bots in Human or Not?

No. A bot in Human or Not tries to hide that it is an AI. An AI character in a game is open about it. Read what NPC means for the older kind of game character.

Where can I find more AI games?

Start at the LifeSim blog. It has lists of AI games, life sims and story games.

More game guides

Sources

New to life sims? Read what a life simulator is, or play LifeSim, a free online life simulator on a real map of Earth.

Sims 4 database

Look it up in the Sims 4 database, read from the game files: cheats, traits, careers, moodlets, deaths, packs, challenges, recipes, popular mods, pack finder, and the death odds calculator.

Related posts

Life sim games