The bot and I

AI is making the distinction between man and machine increasingly indistinct

To research a column, I tried to access a site that I thought might be helpful.

Before the site could open, a message flashed on the screen of my mobile: Verifying You Are Human And Not A Bot. This May Take A Few Moments.

A small dotted circle began to whirlpool on the screen while I waited to have my humanness confirmed. And it was. The spinning circle disappeared to be replaced by a box. Tick To Confirm You Are Human. I ticked as told, and the fact that I was a bona fide human, a fully paid-up member of Homo sapiens, was confirmed.

By this time, I’d forgotten about the information I’d wanted to find, so pleased was I that my human provenance had been reaffirmed for me by an all-knowing AI.

But my initial good cheer at having been certified human, a status that has not infrequently had doubts cast on it by sceptics, gave way to disquiet, which, as I dwelt on the matter, made my quiet more dis.

I was an AI-certified human and not a bot. But the problem with AI, which permeates more and more aspects of our everyday life, is that it’s blurred, if not obliterated, the distinction not only between man and bot, but also between reality and illusion, in the form of deepfakes that are growing with a prodigality of proliferation commonly attributed to jackrabbits.

Indeed, so deep are such fakes, or so fake is their depth, that they elude the powers of human detection and can be unmasked only through the agency of AI, which created them in the first place.

Is my AI-verified humanness a deepfake? A parable tells of a poet who dreams he’s a butterfly, and, on waking, wonders if he’s a butterfly dreaming that he’s a poet.

Could I be a bot programmed by AI to believe I’m human? Am I and the bot mutually interchangeable? Best get Gemini to figure it out…
(Gemini: A search has been unable to ascertain the nature of the subject under question being human/bot/unspecified other.)