RoFT
RoFT is a free web game built by University of Pennsylvania researchers for students, teachers and NLP practitioners: read a passage sentence by sentence, then click the moment you believe a language model took over.
What is RoFT?
RoFT, short for Real or Fake Text, is a free browser game built around one deceptively hard question: at which exact sentence does a piece of writing stop being human and start being machine-generated? The home page puts it plainly: "How good are you at knowing when text has been written by a computer? How many sentences can a computer write before it no longer has you fooled?"
The mechanic is simple. Every passage opens with a sentence that is always written by a human. The following sentences are revealed one at a time, and you click as soon as you are confident the machine has taken over. Scoring rewards precision: 5 points for landing on the exact boundary, 0 points for guessing too early, and 5 minus x points for guessing x sentences too late. Four collections are playable from the home page, each with its passage count shown: Short Stories (2,059), New York Times (2,194), Recipes (2,199) and Presidential Speeches (297). A random-category mode is offered as well, and no account is required to play.
What sets the project apart is its documentation. The About page names the source corpus and the generating model behind each category: the New York Times Annotated Corpus (Sandhaus, 2008) continued by GPT2-XL, Reddit Writing Prompts (Fan et al., 2018) by GPT2 and GPT2-XL, the Corpus of Presidential Speeches (Brown, 2016) by CTRL (Keskar et al., 2019), and Recipe1M+ (Marin et al., 2019) by GPT2-XL. The game is presented as a research experiment in the lineage of the Turing test, made by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, and it cites two of their own publications: an EMNLP 2020 demonstration paper and a large-scale AAAI 2023 study. The source code is released under the MIT licence.
RoFT is not an AI detector. You cannot submit your own text, and there is no API, no mobile app and no report on outside documents.
One caveat outweighs the rest. As of 24 August 2026, only the home page and the login page respond: /about, /help, /leaderboard and /signup return HTTP 500, and /annotate redirects to the home page, so the game itself no longer starts.
What it does
- Pinpoint the exact sentence at which a passage switches from human writing to machine generation
- Play four themed collections, covering short stories, New York Times articles, recipes and presidential speeches, or let the site pick one at random
- Reveal a passage one sentence at a time and stop it the moment you are convinced
- Score each guess against the true boundary, with 5 points for an exact hit
- Learn the recurring flaws of generated text: repetition, common-sense slips, factual errors, incoherence and topic drift
- Save progress, skip passages already seen and track personal statistics with a free account
- Compare your total against other players on the public leaderboard
When to use RoFT / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if RoFT is the right fit.
When to use RoFT
- NLP researchers and model evaluators looking for a human-side measure of how detectable machine-generated text really is
- Teachers and librarians building a media-literacy session around AI-written text
- Journalists, fact-checkers and editors who receive submissions that may have been generated
- Students, from high school to doctoral level, who want practice spotting the tell-tale signs
- Curious readers who want to test their instincts in a few minutes, with no sign-up
When not to use RoFT
- Anyone who needs their own document checked: there is no field to paste or upload text, and the game only serves its own passages
- Teams shopping for an AI-detection or anti-plagiarism service, since RoFT returns no score, verdict or report on third-party content
- Developers and product teams, as there is no API, no SDK and no integration of any kind
- Mobile-first users, since there is no iOS or Android app and the game is web-only
- Organisations with compliance requirements: no terms of service, no privacy policy and no DPA are published, and as of 24 August 2026 the /about, /help, /leaderboard and /signup pages return HTTP 500 while /annotate redirects to the home page, so the game no longer starts
How to use RoFT
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open the site in any browser: there is nothing to install and no extension to add
- Pick one of the four categories, or use Start Game (Random Category) to be served a passage at random
- Read the opening sentence, which is always written by a human
- Reveal the next sentence, then the one after, weighing each as it appears
- Watch for the tells listed on the Help page: repetition, common-sense errors, factual errors, incoherence and topic drift
- Use the Help page examples as a calibration exercise, such as "The cat slept on the window and on the window and on the window." for repetition, "The unicorn had four horns." for common sense and "The president of the United States is Clark Kent." for factual error
- Click as soon as you believe the boundary has been crossed
- Read your score: 5 points for the exact sentence, fewer the later you stop, none if you stop too early
- Optionally open a free account with a username and a password to save progress, avoid passages already seen, track statistics and appear on the leaderboard
- Expect this path to fail today: as of 24 August 2026 /annotate redirects to the home page and /signup returns HTTP 500, so neither a game nor a registration can be completed
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Entirely free, with no paid tier and no announced usage quota
- Playable immediately, with no account, no email address and no installation
- Unusual transparency: source corpora and generating models are documented category by category
- Verifiable academic grounding, with two publications cited alongside their BibTeX entries (EMNLP 2020, AAAI 2023)
- Source code published under the MIT licence
- A Help page that genuinely teaches the recurring flaws of generated text, examples included
- Substantial content, with more than 6,700 passages across the four categories and a simple, explicit scoring rule
Cons
- Largely down as of 24 August 2026: /about, /help, /leaderboard and /signup return HTTP 500 and /annotate redirects to the home page, so the game does not start
- No privacy policy, no terms of service and no legal notice of any kind
- No email address and no contact form, so the operator cannot be reached
- The generating models are dated: GPT-2, GPT-2 XL and CTRL represent 2019 state of the art, well below what current systems produce
- English only, with corpora that are exclusively English-language and heavily United States centred
- No API, no mobile app, no integrations, and no way to submit your own text
- Google Analytics is loaded with no consent banner, and no brand asset is served at all, every /static/ URL returning HTTP 404
Pricing & Plans
RoFT is free of charge. The login page states explicitly that it is "a free game that supports academic research in artificial intelligence". No pricing page, no purchase path and no paid plan exists anywhere on the site, so there is no entry price and no currency to report. There is likewise no trial period, since there is no paid offer to try, and no paid quota, credit bundle or usage cap is announced.
- passages are playable straight from the home page
- with no registration
- saved progress
- no passage served twice
- personal statistics and a place on the public leaderboard
- No enterprise plan
- paid academic licence or quote-based offer is proposed
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how RoFT handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention at all. A full-text search of the site and of its archived pages returns zero occurrences of GDPR or of any equivalent term. No privacy policy, no stated legal basis, no reference to access, rectification or erasure rights, no designated data protection officer and no EU representative under Article 27. No email address and no contact form are published anywhere on the site, so a European user has no channel through which to exercise a right in the first place. Google Analytics runs on every page with no consent banner and no cookie settings. The operator appears to be United States based: the domain is registered through a US registrar and no postal address is published. In practice, a European visitor should assume that no GDPR framework is in place and decide whether to create an account on that basis.
Who owns the data?
Nothing is published on this point. RoFT has no terms of service and no privacy policy: /terms and /privacy both return HTTP 404 and were never archived by the Wayback Machine, so no clause states who owns the annotations players produce, what the operator may do with them, or with whom they may be shared. The sign-up form asks only for a username and a password, with no email address, and an archived leaderboard shows usernames in the clear. With no contract of any kind, players hold no documented rights over their own contributions, and there is no named counterparty to whom a request could even be addressed.
Reuse rights
There are no terms and conditions, so nothing grants or withholds a reuse right in writing. What the site does state is the purpose. The About page sets out two research questions, namely which domains make generated text harder to spot and how the randomness of the generation affects detection, then adds: "Your contributions will be used to answer these research questions." The login page frames the whole thing as "a free game that supports academic research in artificial intelligence", and the annotations gathered fed two papers by the authors, at EMNLP 2020 and AAAI 2023. Google Analytics (UA-104989157-3) is loaded on every page. Nothing is said about model training on player data, about subprocessors, or about any right for players to download or reuse what they have produced. The project's source code is published under the MIT licence, but that covers the code, not the collected annotations, which the site never offers back.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The operator publishes nothing about hosting. There is no privacy policy, no terms, and no trust or security page, hence no declared hosting country, region or provider, which is why the structured hosting fields on this page are left empty. What can be observed from the outside is limited: on 24 August 2026, roft.io resolved to 216.239.36.21, an address in AS15169 (Google LLC) geolocated to Mountain View, United States, and identified as anycast, so it describes the network serving the site rather than the physical location of any stored data. The authors' EMNLP 2020 paper, linked from the About page, states that the website is supported by a grant from the Google Cloud Platform research credits programme, which is consistent with Google infrastructure. Taken together, this points to United States based Google infrastructure, but it remains an inference drawn from a network observation and a research acknowledgement, not a commitment from the operator. No data residency option, no regional choice and no subprocessor list are offered.
Where RoFT works
Country-level availability.
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting RoFT.
- Opening an account means handing over credentials with no published information on what happens next: no privacy policy, no terms, no retention period
- There is no contact channel at all, neither email nor form nor contact page, so there is no route to a question, a correction or a deletion request
- Google Analytics (UA-104989157-3) is loaded on every page with no consent banner and no cookie settings
- The leaderboard displays usernames publicly, so any name that identifies you becomes public alongside your score
- The service has been partly broken since at least 15 November 2025 according to Wayback snapshots, and nothing on the site announces either a shutdown or a repair
- A high score proves little about current systems: the passages come from GPT-2, GPT-2 XL and CTRL, a 2019 generation of models, which can breed false confidence in your own eye
- Never treat the game as evidence in an academic or disciplinary context; it is not an AI detector and delivers no verdict on any document
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Minimal by design. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure: the game runs in any browser, and a round starts straight from the home page without an account. The optional account asks only for a username and a password. No API key, no SDK and no webhook is involved, so no technical skill is required. The only real obstacle today is the state of the service itself: as of 24 August 2026, /annotate redirects to the home page and /signup returns HTTP 500, so neither playing nor registering currently works.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind RoFT
Fundraising
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is RoFT free to use?
Do I need to create an account?
How is the score calculated?
What kind of texts does the game use?
Which models generated the machine-written parts?
Can I have my own text analysed?
Who is behind the project?
Does the site collect personal data?
Is there a mobile app?
Does the site still work today?
Should you pick RoFT?
RoFT does one thing, and for a long time it did it well: it trains the eye to feel the exact point at which writing stops being human. The teaching value is real, and the documentary transparency is well above average for this kind of project. The source corpora, the generating models and the two resulting publications are all named, the scoring rule is explicit, and the code is open under the MIT licence. None of it costs anything, and no commercial trade-off hides behind that.
The counterweight is heavy. No terms of service, no privacy policy, no legal notice and no contact channel of any kind are published, and the Wayback index shows those pages never existed, so this is not a side effect of the current outage. Anyone opening an account does so with no stated retention rule and no way to request deletion. The passages themselves were generated by GPT-2, GPT-2 XL and CTRL, models from 2019, so a good score here says little about your ability to spot what today's systems write.
Then there is the state of the service. As of 24 August 2026, four of the six navigation entries return HTTP 500 and /annotate redirects to the home page, so the game does not start at all; an archived snapshot already shows /about failing in November 2025, which puts the outage at nine months or more.
The verdict follows. RoFT remains genuinely interesting as a research artefact and as teaching material, and the concept, the corpus documentation and the papers still repay a look. As a working service, in its present state, it cannot be recommended.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.