Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet

I applaud the effort. We need human-friendly CAPTCHAs, as much as they're generally disliked. They're the only solution to the growing spam and abuse problem on the web.

Proof-of-work CAPTCHAs work well for making bots expensive to run at scale, but they still rely on accurate bot detection. Avoiding both false positives and negatives is crucial, yet all existing approaches are not reliable enough.

One comment re:

> While AI agents can theoretically simulate these patterns, the effort likely outweighs other alternatives.

For now. Behavioral and cognitive signals seem to work against the current generation of bots, but will likely also be defeated as AI tools become cheaper and more accessible. It's only a matter of time until attackers can train a model on real human input, and inference to be cheap enough. Or just for the benefit of using a bot on a specific target to outweigh the costs.

So I think we will need a different detection mechanism. Maybe something from the real world, some type of ID, or even micropayments. I'm not sure, but it's clear that bot detection is at the opposite, and currently losing, side of the AI race.

> but [PoWs] still rely on accurate bot detection.

No they don't, that's the point: you can serve everyone a PoW and don't have to discriminate and ban real people. This system you're enthusiastic about is what tries to do this "accurate bot detection" (scratch the first word)