12 Surprisingly Fun Things to Do With an AI That Never Goes Online

Most of what gets written about AI, including a fair amount on this blog, is serious business: contracts, client data, privacy policies, productivity. All important. But it leaves out something anyone who’s spent an evening with a chatbot already knows: these things are fun.

And an AI that runs entirely on your own computer turns out to be especially good for fun. It doesn’t need Wi-Fi, so it comes with you to the cabin, the campsite, and seat 34B. It isn’t keeping a record of your chats on someone else’s server, so you can be as silly, weird, or oddly specific as you like. Nobody is going to build an ad profile from the fact that you spent forty minutes arguing about what your cat would do for a living.

So here are a dozen ways to play with it. No productivity required.

1. Run a D&D campaign in a cabin with no signal

Tabletop role-playing games have always had one bottleneck: somebody has to be the Dungeon Master, and that somebody usually ends up doing a lot of homework. A local AI makes a great co-DM. Ask it for a tavern full of suspicious characters, a riddle for the locked door, or a name for the innkeeper who is definitely hiding something.

The best part is that it works when you’re somewhere with no internet, which, if you’ve ever tried to game at a lake house, is exactly where the long weekends happen. Pack the dice and the laptop and you’re set.

Try: “You’re the narrator of a fantasy adventure. Four of us are playing. Describe the village we just walked into and give us three things we could investigate.”

2. Host trivia night at 35,000 feet

Long flights are a good time to discover that your AI works offline. Have it write a trivia round on any theme you can think of: ’90s cartoons, world capitals, famous dogs in history. Then quiz whoever is sitting next to you (with their consent, ideally).

One honest tip: a local model knows what it learned in training, not today’s news, and like any AI it can occasionally be confidently wrong. Keep the questions to classic stuff and treat any “fact” that sounds too good as a fun debate, not a ruling.

Try: “Write 10 trivia questions about space, getting harder as they go. Put the answers at the very end so I don’t see them.”

3. Make up bedtime stories starring your kids (and the dog)

Children have extremely specific story requirements. The hero must be named after them. The dog must also be in it, and the dog must be brave. There should be a dragon, but a nice one. Also, tacos.

A local AI can write that story in seconds, and because it’s running on your own machine, your kids’ names, ages, and favorite stuffed animals stay in your house. You can keep the stories going night after night: “Remember yesterday when Biscuit found the secret door? What was behind it?”

Try: “Write a five-minute bedtime story about a girl named Maya and her beagle Biscuit, who discover a friendly dragon that only eats tacos. Make it gentle and end with everyone falling asleep.”

4. Name absolutely everything

Your sourdough starter. Your new houseplant. Your Wi-Fi network. Your fantasy football team. Your boat, if you’re lucky enough to have a boat. Naming things is a small joy, and an AI is a tireless brainstorming partner who won’t roll its eyes at your fifteenth request.

Try: “Give me 20 names for my sourdough starter. Half should be puns, half should sound like a retired opera singer.”

5. Get a very dramatic reading of mundane things

Ask it to rewrite your grocery list as a Shakespearean monologue. Turn the dishwasher instructions into a nature documentary. Recap last night’s family dinner as a sports broadcast. It’s pointless and it’s delightful.

Try: “Rewrite this grocery list as an epic poem about a brave hero’s quest: eggs, oat milk, paper towels, one (1) emergency chocolate bar.”

6. Settle debates (or make them much worse)

Is a hot dog a sandwich? Which is the best Muppet? Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses? Have the AI argue both sides as seriously as a supreme court justice, then vote.

Try: “Write a formal legal opinion on whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Include a dissenting opinion.”

7. Invent a game for a rainy day

Bored kids, a power outage, a snowed-in weekend: ask for a brand-new game using only what’s around. It can design a scavenger hunt for your apartment, a card game using a regular deck, or a word game for a long car ride. And yes, it’ll work if the storm has knocked out your internet, as long as your laptop still has battery.

Try: “Invent a new game for three kids aged 7–10 using a deck of cards and a few household items. Keep the rules short enough to explain in two minutes.”

8. Write the world’s most over-the-top birthday card

Anyone can write “Happy birthday, hope it’s a great one!” Ask your AI for a limerick, a haiku sequence, a fake news article announcing the birthday, or a toast in the style of a pirate captain. Then personalize it with in-jokes. Real names and embarrassing stories are fine here, because they aren’t going anywhere.

Try: “Write a birthday limerick for my brother Sam, who is turning 40, loves fishing, and once got his car stuck in a corn field.”

9. Plan an imaginary vacation

Sometimes the fun is in the planning, even when the trip isn’t happening. Ask for a seven-day itinerary through a real country, or go full fantasy: a week-long tour of Middle-earth, a road trip through the 1960s, a vacation on the moon with a strict budget.

(For real trips, double-check anything time-sensitive, like opening hours or prices, since your AI doesn’t browse the web. For moon trips, it’s probably fine.)

Try: “Plan a 5-day vacation to the moon for a family of four on a ‘reasonable’ budget. Include a gift shop.”

10. Practice a language without an audience

Want to brush up on your Spanish before a trip, but feel self-conscious? Ask the AI to play a waiter in a café in Madrid and order lunch. Make as many mistakes as you like, then ask it to gently correct you afterward. Nobody’s recording, and there’s no leaderboard.

Try: “Let’s role-play in simple Spanish. You’re a waiter at a café in Madrid and I’m ordering lunch. After five exchanges, switch to English and point out my mistakes kindly.”

11. Write collaborative fiction, one line at a time

Take turns. You write a sentence, it writes the next one. The story will go somewhere neither of you expected, usually involving a haunted lighthouse or a detective who is secretly a raccoon. It’s a great way to beat writer’s block, or just to pass an evening.

Try: “Let’s write a mystery story together, alternating one or two sentences at a time. I’ll start: ‘The lighthouse keeper had been missing for three days, but the light kept turning on every night.‘“

12. Ask the questions you’d never type into a search bar

“Is it weird that I’ve never understood how tides work?” “Explain cryptocurrency like I’m a medieval peasant.” “What would happen if everyone on Earth jumped at the same time?” Curiosity is at its best when there’s no judgment and no record of it, and that’s what you get when nobody’s on the other end.

Try: “Explain how the stock market works, but as if you’re a pirate explaining it to his crew.”

A few tips for having more fun

• Give it a character. “You are a grumpy wizard” or “You’re a sports commentator” gets much livelier answers than a plain request.
• Ask for more than you need. “Give me 20 options” beats “give me a name.” The fifteenth idea is usually the funny one.
• Keep the conversation going. You can build on stories, games, and characters across a whole chat, and it’ll remember what happened earlier.
• Don’t treat it as an encyclopedia. For fun, the occasional made-up fact is part of the charm. For anything that matters, double-check. (We have more tips on getting good answers if you want them.)

Why this is better on your own computer

You can do plenty of these with a cloud chatbot, as long as you have a connection and don’t mind the chats sitting on a company’s servers. But fun tends to happen where the internet doesn’t reach: on planes, at campsites, in the back seat on a road trip. And a lot of it involves the personal stuff you’d hesitate to hand to a big tech company: your kids’ names, family in-jokes, your terrible first attempts at Spanish.

WorkInPrivate runs open-source AI models entirely on the computer you already own. Download it once and it works anywhere, with or without Wi-Fi. There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and nobody reading along.

If you’d like a game master, trivia host, and bedtime storyteller that fits in your laptop bag, the free trial is a good place to start. Biscuit the beagle recommends it.