I have a theory that as AI gets better and better at mimicking humans, the only way to differentiate humans from bots, is to identify the human. This may not even be a conscious development from the company.

For example, Google’s Recaptcha might be a big black box of AI models, that gets data about the user and spits out “human” or “bot”. These AI models already get a ton of data about the user, like mouse movements, scrolling behavior, and keyboard strokes (afaik Recaptcha tracks all of this, and Cloudflare will soon). What if at some point, Google realizes that the AI has evolved to identify users, tying them to long-standing Google accounts or government IDs, because it’s the most effective way to distinguish them from bots?

Google is already releasing the captcha that requires a Google-approved phone. That is also a privacy dead-end. But I wonder if Recaptcha and Cloudflare’s new Precursor captcha, are already deanonymizing people.

And even open source projects and websites are starting to adopt Anubis, and complaining about AI contributions and slop. It seems like even the open source world is crawling towards human verification. The future of privacy does not look bright.