Mattel’s Pictionary Vs. AI leaves the guesswork to the bots

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A picture of a smartphone pointed at a quick drawing of a cat. It’s guessing it’s a tiger. It is wrong. Game pieces are strewn about.
Why, that’s not a tiger at all, my gAI. | Image: Mattel
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Mattel has announced Pictionary Vs. AI, a version of its visual guessing game where an AI model does all the guessing, using computer vision with a smartphone as the medium. The company just announced the game at the 2023 Code Conference, which is co-hosted by Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel. The physical board game will cost $24.99 starting on September 27th at Mattel’s website, and it will head to retail on October 2nd.

The idea is that players draw cards that assign a given word, then sketch whatever that word is before letting a web app guess what they’ve drawn. The app uses your camera to look at the artwork. You win (and move forward on the board) either when the AI identifies the image, or by successfully gambling — er, I mean,…

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