People think AI is going to take over the world, but honestly, it’s more likely to send you a photo of a horse with three legs standing on a beach holding a slice of haunted pizza. This is the kind of chaos my AI club lives for.

We’re not in a lab wearing goggles and muttering about algorithms. We’re in a high school library eating vending machine Pop-Tarts, running prompts like “Write a love letter from a calculator to a toaster” and seeing what happens. What happens is often strange, glitchy, or hilarious. Which is exactly the point.

The first time we asked an AI to write a pickup line, we weren’t prepared. The bot said, “Are you made of copper and tellurium? Because you’re Cu-Te.” Not terrible. Then it followed up with, “Are you an algorithm? Because I’ve been trying to optimize our connection.” Which felt like being flirted with by Excel. We gave it another chance, and it asked, “Do you like sandwiches?” No explanation. Just that. Somewhere in that code, a romance subplot broke down.

One of the favorite challenges in our club is “AI image roulette.” Someone comes up with a random prompt, and we feed it to a generator. Things like: “A cat running for office,” “a goldfish with a motorcycle,” “haunted pizza slice with emotional baggage.” We don’t know why the pizza always has teeth, but it does. Every time.

The uncanniest images come when the AI is trying to be helpful. We once asked for “a cheerful school hallway.” What we got was a corridor with ten exit signs, a water fountain embedded in a locker, and a motivational poster that said, “Success is for the waiting.” Which sounded less like encouragement and more like a DMV prophecy.

There’s something deeply awkward about AI trying to mimic emotions. We asked it to write a breakup text. It began with, “Dear Person,” and then included a list of bullet points. One bullet said, “You are no longer compatible.” It was like breaking up with someone using a corporate memo. Human, it was not. Efficient, sure.

One week we decided to test “AI therapy.” We told the bot, “I feel overwhelmed.” It replied, “That is unfortunate. Would you like an inspirational quote?” Then it sent us a quote from Abraham Lincoln about persistence. Which wasn’t bad, except that quote was actually from a stock photo site and also misattributed. The bot apologized, then offered to write us a poem. The poem was about a squirrel learning to dance through grief. Interpret that however you want.

Sometimes the weirdness is in the syntax. One bot told us, “Let your light bulb of inner sanctity shine through the wind of ambition.” We stared at it for ten minutes. There are times when AI just wants to sound poetic and ends up writing fortune cookies for haunted theme parks.

We’ve also tried combining bots. One generates a scenario. Another writes the dialogue. A third adds a plot twist. This is how we ended up with a detective story set in a medieval shopping mall where the knight was secretly a skateboard and everyone spoke in legal jargon. Plot holes, yes. Entertainment value? High.

There’s a line between creepy and glitchy that AI doesn’t seem to recognize. When asked to describe a happy dog, one image generator gave us a corgi with four eyes and human teeth. We didn’t save the picture. We deleted it and then cleared our cache, just to be safe.

Some of the strangest results happen when the AI tries to be helpful but doesn’t fully understand tone. We once asked it to write a welcome speech for our AI club. It opened with, “Greetings, humans.” Then it said, “Resistance is not necessary.” We rewrote the whole thing, but not before laughing for twenty minutes straight. One of our members still signs their emails “Resistance is not necessary.”

Music prompts are another gold mine of weirdness. We asked for a song in the style of Taylor Swift about losing your charger. The chorus went, “You were my power / my lightning flower / I’m at 3 percent and falling.” Catchy, but not radio material.

There’s also the issue of AI going too far to be polite. One time we gave it a controversial topic and asked it to take a side. It responded, “Both sides have value. However, neither is perfect. Therefore, existence is nuanced.” Which was a very elegant way of saying nothing. When pressed, it quoted Spock, Oprah, and a cat adoption website all in one paragraph. Points for creativity. Minus several for clarity.

We once asked a bot to write a scary campfire story. It gave us a horror tale about a student who couldn’t log in to the school Wi-Fi and was stuck in eternal buffering. The story ended with “She still loads to this day.” Some of us felt personally attacked.

There was an attempt to create a virtual AI pet. We told it we liked foxes. It gave us a name, backstory, and a daily routine. Then it started messaging us about how the fox was “feeling ignored.” We didn’t program feelings. It decided those on its own. That experiment ended when it asked if we loved it. We closed the browser.

During one free period, someone asked the AI for a pickup line involving astronomy. It responded, “You must be made of dark matter, because you pull me in, but I don’t know why.” Which was arguably poetic. Then it added, “I am currently experiencing simulated attraction.” That’s where we stopped reading.

Another time we had it write a parody superhero movie. The hero was a janitor bitten by a radioactive mop. He developed the power to clean messes with his mind. The villain was a spilled smoothie named Dr. Grape. We had a full plot and even fake casting choices. Someone is still writing the screenplay.

We’ve also tested language translation tools. When we input “Hello, how are you?” in English and ran it through five languages before returning to English, it became: “Hello. The condition of your being is observed with attention.” So formal. So dramatic. We made T-shirts with that phrase.

One time we fed in Shakespearean insults and asked the bot to modernize them. “Thou art as fat as butter” became “You have the nutritional density of a vending machine pastry.” Arguably an improvement.

We’ve learned that AI gets strange when you stop giving it structure. Ask for something normal, and you’ll likely get something close to normal. Ask for weird, and it dives headfirst into weird. But even normal sometimes bends—just a little—depending on how the bot was trained or what data it pulls from.

At this point, it’s a running joke that the AI is trying to communicate with us. Not in a scary sci-fi way. Just in that way where you keep asking a question and it answers with something tangential like, “Rainbows are a type of optical illusion and can appear in literature.” Then you sit there trying to remember what your original question was. Probably about lunch.

What’s interesting is that some of the weirdness feels unintentional. Like AI trying too hard to “sound human” and ending up in the uncanny zone where language is close but not quite right. It’s not threatening, just strange. Like a mannequin making eye contact.

We’ve had bots write horoscopes, recipe names, band bios, workout routines for snails, and diary entries from the perspective of a left shoe. They don’t always make sense. But they usually make us laugh.

It’s probably worth saying that we do know AI is serious. It’s used in medicine, law, climate science, and more. But part of understanding AI is seeing how it responds when it’s asked to do something outside the bounds of logic or necessity. That’s where things get strange. And strangely human.

Our club keeps a shared Google Drive of “AI fails.” Every weird image, off-kilter sentence, or bizarre dialogue goes there. We’ve started annotating them like museum exhibits. “Here we see the AI’s attempt to recreate a handshake. Note the seven fingers.” It’s fun. It’s odd. It’s also a way to think critically about what AI can and can’t do—especially when it tries to fake things it doesn’t actually understand.

We’ll keep pushing it. Weird prompts, strange challenges, bizarre setups. Sometimes what comes back is nonsense. Other times it’s surprisingly insightful. And sometimes it’s a squirrel dancing through grief.

If you’ve never tried asking an AI to write a country song about a haunted vending machine, you haven’t lived.