Play I/O FLIP, our AI-designed card game

At Google I/O 2023, we shared how advancements in AI can make information more accessible and improve our everyday lives — and help us have a little fun, too.

Before we hit the stage, we released I/O FLIP, an AI-designed card game that shows you the playful, experimental side of generative AI in action.

How to play I/O FLIP

I/O FLIP is a spin on a classic card game, where you compete in best-of-three matches for the longest winning streak on the leaderboard. But in this case, you’re playing with custom cards made using generative AI.

Here’s how it works: You choose two characteristics — a class, like a magician, and a special power, like invisibility. A deck of 12 cards inspired by your selections will appear, including unique characters and backgrounds, and randomly assigned elements and strengths. Once you pick your three favorite cards, you’ll start battling for the win.

How we built the cards using generative AI

Using our own character designs as training data, we created thousands of bespoke images with two technologies developed by Google Research: Muse, a text-to-image AI model, and DreamBooth, a technique running on top of Muse that allows you to personalize text-to-image models to generate novel images of a specific subject. Then we pre-generated hundreds of thousands of unique text descriptions using the PaLM API. As a final step, we integrated these generative AI tools with our developer tools — Flutter, Dart, Firebase and Google Cloud — to create the game interface and mechanics, and quickly bring it to life. So in short, your custom deck of cards is the result of millions of combinations of pre-generated text and images.

Learn more about how we built I/O FLIP and take a look at the open source code.