The Day I Played Hide-and-Seek with an AI
The author describes an experiment where they played hide-and-seek with an AI by hiding somewhere in their home and asking a language model to guess their location based on contextual clues. The AI successfully deduced the hiding spot after a series of logical questions, demonstrating how conversational AI can engage in reasoning and inference through natural dialogue.
Background
- This is a first-person narrative about the author testing an AI-powered surveillance system by trying to evade it in real-time. It is not a news story but a reflective essay.
- The "AI" in question is a modern computer-vision system, likely similar to commercial security platforms (e.g., from companies like Hikvision, Dahua, or startups using object-detection models like YOLO). The essay focuses on the experience of being watched and tracked.
- Key context: Surveillance technology has become vastly cheaper and more powerful in recent years. AI can now identify and track specific individuals across camera feeds, recognize behaviors, and issue alerts — capabilities once reserved for intelligence agencies.
- The essay's significance lies in its personal, visceral angle: it makes abstract concerns about privacy and mass surveillance concrete by showing what it feels like to be the tracked subject, not just the data point.