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

(research.roundtable.ai)
133 points timshell | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 15:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.543s | source
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logsr ◴[25 Jun 25 17:26 UTC] No.44379782[source]▶
In a few more years there will probably be virtually no human users of web sites and apps. Everything will be through an AI agent mediation layer. Building better CAPTCHAs is interesting technically, but it is doubling down on a failed solution that nobody actually wants. What is needed is an authentication layer that allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage. CAPTCHA has always been an economic bar only, since they are easy to farm out to human solvers, and it is a very low bar. Having an agent API with usage charges is a much better solution because it compensates operators instead of wasting the cost of solving CAPTCHAs. Maybe this will finally be the era of micro payments?
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1. Nextgrid ◴[26 Jun 25 02:22 UTC] No.44383688[source]▶
> allows agents to act on behalf of registered users with economic incentives to control usage

There's a huge economy out there based on wasting human time. They explicitly do not want agents acting on behalf of humans, because it means human time is no longer being wasted.

They also don't want to get paid in money, because the money would go to a different profit center. The only payment they accept (because they use that as a metric to justify their salary) is "engagement" aka proof of wasted human time.

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2. sly010 ◴[26 Jun 25 05:48 UTC] No.44384526[source]▶
Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").