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.

> 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.

I think the most likely long-term solution is something like DIDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier

A small number of trusted authorities (e.g. governments) issue IDs. Users can identify themselves to third-parties without disclosing their real-world identity to the third-party and without disclosing their interaction with the third-party to the issuing body.

The key part of this is that the identity is persistent. A website might not know who you are, but they know when it’s you returning. So if you get banned, you can’t just register a new account to evade the ban. You’d need to do the equivalent of getting a new passport from your government.

On the one hand, yes, this might work, but I'm concerned that it will inevitably require loss of anonymity and be abused by companies for user tracking. I suppose any type of user identification or fingerprinting is at the expense of user privacy, but I hope we can come up with solutions that don't have these drawbacks.

> I'm concerned that it will inevitably require loss of anonymity and be abused by companies for user tracking.

Are you sure you read my comment fully?

I did. It doesn't matter that the website might not be able to directly associate a real-world identity with a digital one. It takes a small number of signals to uniquely fingerprint a user, so it's only a matter of associating the fingerprint with the ID, whether that's a real-world or digital one. It can still be used for tracking. By having a static ID that can only be issued by governments or approved agencies we'd only be making things easier for companies to track users.

This sounds like a red herring to me.

If the only way to associate a user with their ID is by fingerprinting them, you can do the same thing without an ID with having shadow profiles. If the proof system is designed for privacy, the ID doesn't make you more trackable.

In other words, if the ID never directly leaks companies can just make up a static ID for you and get the same results.

Kind of. A fingerprint is an implicit ID, whereas the ID suggested by GP would be semi-permanently associated to an individual. So it would make tracking even easier, since most web sites outside of adtech don't bother with sophisticated fingerprinting. It would be similar to a tracking cookie, except the user would have no control over it.