Post inspired by the bot threat that people on Lemmy have been talking about. I’m not asking how an expert would design it, but how you would design it if you were tasked with it.
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Any bot? That’s just impossible. We’re going to have to tie identity back to meatspace somehow eventually.
An existing bot? I don’t think I can improve on existing captchas, really. I imagine an LLM will eventually tip their hand, too, like giving an “as an AI” answer or just knowing way too much stuff.
Wait a minute - GPT-4 - is that you asking this question?
Very simple.
In every area of the world, there are one or more volunteers depending on population / 100 sq km. When someone wants to sign up, they knock on this person’s door and shakes their hand. The volunteer approves the sign-up as human. For disabled folks, a subset of volunteers will go to them to do this. In extremely remote area, various individual workarounds can be applied.
This has some similarities to the invite-tree method that lobste.rs uses. You have to convince another, existing user that you’re human to join. If a bot invites lots of other bots it’s easy to tree-ban them all, if a human is repeatedly fallible you can remove their invite privileges, but you still get bots in when they trick humans (lobsters isn’t handshakes-at-doorstep level by any margin).
I convinced another user to invite me over IRC. That’s probably the worst medium for convincing someone that you’re human, but hey, humanity through obscurity :)
Hahah, I’ll say!
That’s exactly what a bot would say, bake him away toys!
This sounds like something a bot would like to know 🤔