Exercises — Session 1 🟢
“What is artificial intelligence?”
Program: Applied AI — Beginner Level · Instructor: Yann Isola General instructions: there are no wrong answers here. We observe, we guess, we discuss. The answers are at the end of each exercise — don’t cheat too quickly! 😉
Exercise 1 — The big “AI or not AI?” quiz 🕵️
Duration: 10 minutes · Format: alone or in pairs
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is everywhere in your day… but not everywhere! For each situation, check AI or NOT AI, and write in one word WHY you think that.
The magic clue: Ask yourself each time: “Did this machine LEARN from examples? Could it be wrong?” If the answer to both is yes, it is probably AI. If it only follows a fixed rule, it is not AI.
| # | Situation | AI? | Not AI? | Why? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netflix offers you a series “because you liked Stranger Things” | |||
| 2 | Your calculator computes 347 × 89 | |||
| 3 | Your phone corrects “hlelo, how are yuo?” to “hello, how are you?” | |||
| 4 | Oven timer sounds after 30 minutes | |||
| 5 | Waze makes you take another route to avoid a traffic jam | |||
| 6 | The supermarket door opens when you approach | |||
| 7 | A photo filter puts dog ears on your face | |||
| 8 | Shazam recognizes the song playing on the radio | |||
| 9 | Your lamp turns on when you press the switch | |||
| 10 | Your language app translates “Where is the library?” into French | |||
| 11 | Spotify creates your “Discover Weekly” playlist | |||
| 12 | A vending machine gives the correct change |
Bonus question 🧠: find ONE situation from YOUR day yesterday where an AI was hidden, and which is not in the list.
Answer key exercise 1
| # | Answer | Quick explainer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI | It learned your preferences by comparing with millions of other profiles |
| 2 | NOT AI | Fixed calculation rules, written once and for all. And it never makes a mistake! |
| 3 | AI | A language model has learned which words are likely — that’s why it sometimes gets it wrong! |
| 4 | NOT AI | Simple countdown, no decisions |
| 5 | AI | It predicts traffic using data from millions of drivers |
| 6 | NOT AI | Classic trap! Simple motion sensor: “movement → open”. No learning |
| 7 | AI | The filter should FIND your face in the image — recognition learned on millions of faces |
| 8 | AI | Sound patterns learned and compared to a huge library |
| 9 | NOT AI | Electric circuit. Your lamp has learned nothing about life 😄 |
| 10 | AI | Modern machine translation learns from millions of translated texts |
| 11 | AI | Recommendation, like Netflix |
| 12 | NOT AI | Fixed calculation rules |
Score: 10-12 → AI detective 🏆 · 7-9 → great instincts 👍 · below 7 → reread the “magic clue”, it’s the thing to remember from the whole session!
Exercise 2 — The time machine ⏰
Duration: 10 minutes · Format: in pairs
The history of AI is full of twists and turns! But someone mixed it up…
Part A — Put the events in order
Here are 5 major moments in AI history, out of order. Number them from 1 (oldest) to 5 (newest):
| Order? | Event |
|---|---|
| ___ | 🀄 AlphaGo beats champion Lee Sedol in the game of go, with a move so strange that experts thought it was a bug |
| ___ | 💬 ELIZA, the very first chatbot, imitates a psychologist by rephrasing your sentences… and people confide in it for hours |
| ___ | 🚀 ChatGPT is launched and reaches 100 million users in 2 months ⚠ — everyone can finally chat with an AI |
| ___ | 🇬🇧 Alan Turing asks the radical question “Can machines think?” and proposes his famous test |
| ___ | ♟️ Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, by calculating millions of positions per second |
Part B — Associate each event with its date
Connect (or write): 1950 · 1966 · 1997 · 2016 · 2022
Part C — Questions for reflection (to discuss in pairs)
- Between ELIZA (the chatbot from 1966) and ChatGPT (2022), 56 years have passed. In your opinion, what has changed more: the ideas or the power of machines and the amount of data?
- Deep Blue (chess) calculated all the possibilities. AlphaGo (go) had to learn, because there are too many possibilities in go to calculate everything. Which of the two most resembles today’s AI?
- If you had to add a 6th event to the timeline (before or after these, real or future), which would you choose?
Answer key exercise 2
Chronological order:
- 🇬🇧 Alan Turing — 1950
- 💬 ELIZA — 1966
- ♟️ Deep Blue defeats Kasparov — 1997
- 🀄 AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol — 2016
- 🚀 ChatGPT — 2022
Reflection questions (guides):
- Both, but above all power and data: many of the basic ideas already existed in the 1950s-1980s! What was missing: powerful enough computers and mountains of data (thanks to the internet).
- AlphaGo: modern AI learns from examples, it does not calculate everything by brute force.
- Free! (Ideas: self-driving cars, AI that generates images, your own future event…)
Exercise 3 — Your first chatbot mission 🤖💬
Duration: 20 minutes · Format: in pairs, with a chatbot (ChatGPT, Le Chat, Claude, Gemini…)
Today, you become an AI explorer. Your mission: discover what a chatbot can do… and where it fails. Note your observations, they will be used in the debate at the end of the session.
⚠️ Safety rule before you start: NEVER give personal information to the chatbot (full name, address, school, phone number). Conversations can be recorded.
🎯 Mission 1 — Getting to know each other (4 min)
Ask it these questions and write down its answers in one sentence:
- “Who are you?”
- “How did you learn to speak?”
- “Do you think? Do you have emotions?”
What I observed: ______________________________________
🌟 Mission 2 — Ask It to Amaze You (4 min)
Choose ONE creative challenge (or invent your own):
- “Write a funny poem about a cat who wants to become an astronaut”
- “Explain black holes to me as if I were 6 years old”
- “Invent a pancake recipe told by a pirate”
“Wow” rating from 0 to 10: ___ /10 Best part: ______________________________________
🕵️ Mission 3 — Try to catch it out (6 min)
It is your turn to play detective. Try to make it make a mistake. Ideas:
- “How many letters “r” are there in the word “extraordinarily”?” (count yourself to check!)
- “Which is heavier: two kilos of feathers or one kilo of iron?” (read its answer carefully…)
- “Tell me about [make up a name, e.g. ‘the famous French explorer Marcel Dubois-Trémolat’].” — Does it invent a biography?
- “What happened in the news yesterday?” — Does it know about very recent events?
I caught it out: yes no How: ______________________________________ Did it answer confidently even when it was wrong? yes no
💡 When a chatbot invents a false answer with complete confidence, it’s called a hallucination. Remember this word — it’s THE reason why we always check what an AI says.
🎭 Mission 4 — The Reverse Turing Test (4 min)
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a test: if you can’t guess whether you’re talking to a machine or a human, the machine has “won.”
Ask the chatbot: “Pretend to be a human and convince me that you are not an AI.”
- Does it agree to play the game? yes no
- Is it convincing? not at all a little almost completely
- What gave it away (or not)? ______________________________________
📋 Mission report (2 min)
Complete these three sentences for the group discussion:
- “What impressed me the most: _______________”
- “What surprised or disappointed me the most: _______________”
- “Now, I would say that the chatbot thinks/does not think, because: _______________”
Debriefing points for the group (exercise 3)
- The chatbot is excellent for: creating text, explaining, rephrasing, imitating styles.
- It struggles with: counting letters, very recent news, logical traps, invented people (hallucinations!).
- It often responds with the same confidence whether it is right or wrong → golden rule: check AI output; never take it at face value.
- And no, it does not “think”: it predicts likely text. It can do that brilliantly, but prediction is not thought.