Determining if a chat partner is a human or bot has become a modern survival skill. I recently spent hours playing the social game Human or Not. This experiment forced me to analyze every comma and capital letter. Many players lose because they look for obvious errors. In reality, modern large language models are too polished for their own good. In this post, I will share five lessons on spotting AI behavior to help you win your next digital encounter.
Identifying a human or bot requires looking past the surface of the text. Most people assume chatbots make factual mistakes or sound robotic. That is no longer true for advanced neural networks. Today, AI gives itself away through unnatural consistency and a lack of cultural context. If a response feels too perfect, it probably is.
Recent data from the Human or Not game shows that players often fail to recognize bot behavior. We expect AI to be cold. Instead, it tries very hard to be friendly and helpful. This forced politeness is a major red flag in casual settings.
Most humans are lazy when they type on a phone. We forget periods. We skip capital letters. We use slang that breaks standard grammar rules. A human or bot test often ends quickly when one side uses perfect syntax.
Human Pattern: Lowercase starts, missing periods, and frequent typos.
AI Pattern: Flawless capitalization and perfectly placed commas.
Why it Matters: Machine learning models are trained on formal data sets. They default to "correct" writing even in a casual chat.
If you see a perfectly formatted list in a two minute chat, you are likely facing a bot. Real people rarely format their thoughts so clearly under a time limit.
The time it takes to reply is a dead giveaway. Humans have a variable response time. We might type a short word instantly. A complex thought takes a few seconds. We also get distracted by real life.
Inconsistent Timing: Humans pause to think or fix a typo.
Uniform Latency: AI agents often deliver a block of text at a set interval.
The Test: Ask a complex question followed by a very simple one. If both answers arrive with the same delay, it is a bot.
AI has a knowledge cutoff. It knows history, but it often misses what happened ten minutes ago on social media. It struggles with hyper-local slang and niche memes.
- Ask about a specific local event: "Did you hear about that crash on 5th street an hour ago?"
- Use deep irony: Bots often take sarcasm literally.
- Check for "Safe" answers: AI is programmed to avoid controversy.
If the partner gives a generic, "I am not sure about that" response to a viral news story, proceed with caution. Humans usually have an opinion, even if it is a wrong one.
AI loves to be helpful. This is a core part of its instruction tuning. If you ask a simple question, a human gives a simple answer. A bot often provides a mini-essay.
Example:
You: "Do you like pizza?"
Human: "Yeah, obsessed with it."
Bot: "I do not eat, but pizza is a very popular dish globally with many toppings."
This repetition of your question and the need to provide "useful" facts is a hallmark of generative AI. It cannot resist adding context that nobody asked for.
In a human or bot challenge, check for long-term consistency. Bots sometimes lose the thread of a conversation if it becomes too "meta." They might contradict a statement made three sentences earlier.
The Strategy: Mention a fake name early in the chat. Bring it up again later with a different detail.
Human Response: "Who? You never mentioned that guy."
AI Response: It might try to play along or hallucinate a fact about the fake person.
Hallucination occurs when the model tries to fill a gap in its logic. If the story starts changing, you are likely talking to a bot that is struggling with its context window.
For more on how language patterns reveal AI, see Language Patterns That Trick Most Players.