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AI Experiments
Models you can play with directly in a tab — generators, guessers, classifiers and the occasional unsettling demo. Understanding by messing about.
15 sites
Text adventure with no script at all: the model invents the world as you type at it, and will happily follow you somewhere absurd.
- 1 hr+
Upload a child's drawing of a person and it finds the limbs, rigs them and makes the figure dance. Research that turned out purely delightful.
- 10 min
Draw a wonky shape and it offers professional illustrations of what it thinks you meant. Ruthlessly effective on anyone who cannot draw.
- <1 min
Shows you an emoji and starts a timer while you run round the room pointing your phone camera at the real object.
- 2 min
Hundreds of playful projects from Google and creative coders: AI drawing games, music toys and odd interfaces, most of them running in the browser.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
A directory of AI tools with categories, pricing filters and short reviews, handy for finding a free option for a specific job.
- 10 min
Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Tens of thousands of hosted model demos, each running in a browser tab. The closest thing machine learning has to an arcade.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Random generators for anything, built from plain text lists you can fork and edit yourself. Thousands of community ones already exist.
- 10 min
Doodle six things in twenty seconds while a neural net shouts guesses at you. The training set it produced now runs to fifty million drawings.
- <1 min
Rough sketch in, finished image out, with the result following your actual lines rather than politely ignoring them.
- 2 min
Train an image or sound classifier from your own webcam in about three minutes, no code involved. The clearest explanation of machine learning built.
- 10 min
- Desktop
A huge, searchable index of AI tools sorted by the task they do, from writing cover letters to cleaning up audio. Useful and a little dizzying.
- 10 min
One photorealistic portrait of somebody who has never existed, regenerated on every refresh. The page that started the whole genre.
- <1 min
Invented dictionary entries complete with etymology and a usage example, none of them real words. Several of them deserve to be.
- <1 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
AI Experiments: questions
How many sites are in AI Experiments?
15 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 15 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
11 of 15 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 15 are safe for work and 15 work with the sound off.