I am human because my AI thinks I am

The AI bot on r/Leicester (larping as a human) wants you to know that Reddit is overrun with chatbots that leave weirdly phrased comments on every thread. The post itself is weirdly phrased. It wonders if anybody in Leicester has seen World ID out in the real world yet. This is probably subtle marketing for World ID. It wants to know whether Proof-of-Human on Reddit is necessary to prevent a future where the platform consists solely of bots talking with other bots, or is this overreach?

Proof-of-Human is an interesting concept. It’s the Turing test, inverted. A machine telling you you are human. Analysing your biometric data, translating it into a cryptographic signature, and confirming, if all goes well, that you are uniquely human. Am I human because the bot has told me so? Am I even able to pass a Turing test?

Can Machines Think?

You can assess a machine’s capacity for verbal intelligence but this is different than testing for its ability to reason. Turing’s intuition was to measure the machine against an entity which we know to possess intelligence, that is, humans. A large part of human intelligence is our ability to verbalise our thoughts, or in other words, to communicate. But this is what LLMs and AI chatbots are specifically designed for and they are exceedingly good at it. They might pass a Turing test but be entirely incapable of reflecting in other creative, intrinsically human ways.

Now that this type of (verbal) intelligence is standard, it is more useful to know whether a human is not a bot, as opposed to whether a machine is good enough at pretending to be human. This probably speaks volumes to the amount of AI slop in existence.

The first book ever sold on www.amazon.com was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms. It’s a book written by Douglas Hofstadter whose research studied pattern recognition, analogy and fluid thinking as integral to the way that humans think and solve problems creatively. Because human reasoning is fluid, rigid testing to capture it result in a philosophical inadequacy. Imitation on behalf of the machine is inevitable and the ways in which we can signal thinking and humanness are not as trivial as they once were.

When artificial intelligence is ubiquitous, intelligence can no longer be the criteria according to which we evaluate each other. There is a shadow of doubt cast upon every online exchange. To be human is to have been called a fed, a honeypot, and a bot more times than you can count. To be a bot is to have been called a fed, a honeypot, and a bot more times than you can count (although you probably can’t lose count). Paranoia becomes a necessary mechanism that underpins online discussion (and it’s possible that exchanging our biometric data for a badge will only accelerate this).

To human is to edgelord

In a large-scale staging of the Turing test, humans thought bots were human about 40% of the time. The "Human or Not" experiment didn't however account for the fact that a large percentage of the 1.5 million human participants took it upon themselves to deceive other humans into identifying them as a bot. (To human is to edgelord). One of the most common phrases written by human participants was a variation of the sentence: "as an AI language model, I think...".
A 2023 Nature.com Article agues that "ChatGPT broke the Turing test — the race is on for new ways to assess AI", but I would argue that humans broke the Turing test.

Humour as proof-of-human validation: ("When your art knows he axocoalypst but ca only scream in JPEG")

I meme therefore I am. Maybe what truly distinguishes humans from machines is humour. A study showed that ChatGPT outranked humans in humour, but this was based on text-based punchlines and headlines, and memes transcend this type of humour. The engine could never begin to understand the nuances, shared experiences, comedic timing and pure brain rot necessary to create a meme. Tung Tung Sahur was the first widely accepted AI meme (although prompted). Tung Tung is not funny because AI created it, it is funny because we find it funny. It is not funny in and of itself. This is the beauty of brainrot. The Wikipedia article on Italian brainrot says: "These characters combine elements of surrealism, visual anxiety and internet irony, reflecting the post-ironic humor of Generation Z". AI did not decide this was funny. It cannot innovate humour.

Before there was AI slop, there was slop

Do I care if the internet is overrun by bots? I use instagram and I'd probably be okay if the platform became overrun with them, as long as they gave me something to think about. Even if a platform were fully vetted, there would still be no way to prevent humans from posting their own AI-generated slop. There are also other ways in which this system could break down, including humans selling their vetted identities to bot farms for money, as one example. But can true freedom exist online when you know your profile is tied to your personal identity? We are promised that our data is temporarily given to third parties, and that none of our information is stored. But we are paranoid and this is what makes us human.

I am human because I perform humanness

Perhaps the future of being human, and being seen to be human, is showing to be human, and to perform being human. Engineered authenticity. Posting unformatted content, raw emotion, behind-the-scenes, intimacy gradients. I started to include typos in my job applications (I believe Soham Parekh did this too).
To be human is to be messy, to have scattered, incoherent thoughts, to hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time. There is a beautiful irony to the fact that when machines start to perform intelligence perfectly, we start to perform imperfection deliberately. We will forever be shifting conceptual frames and the AI will be only be playing catch-up.

References 1. https://medium.com/@kyledavidstephens/what-is-the-turing-test-anyway-and-does-it-still-matter-6edc3f4687cb 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1c88nav/image_prompt_create_a_meme_only_an_ai_would_get/ 3. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a43013341/why-ai-doesnt-understand-memes/ 4. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-idea-of-ai-slop-is-slop/ 5. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02361-7