Tag: reverseturing

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Favorited AI Policy and Human.json by Claudine Chionh
Favorited Adding human.json to WordPress by Terence Eden

Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF?

In these days of needing to assume anything you encounter is machine generated unless proven to be human made, we continuously have to apply a Reverse Turing test: do I have enough indications to assume something was created by a human.

When I first wrote a Reverse Turing page I mentioned much the same things as Terence Eden does about vouching for other people to be human authors.

Not sure if having a machine readable file makes the right point here though, ironic as it is. Blogrolls, webrings come to mind too, because Long Live the Author.

One element I think we’d need to contemplate is to not just list, but also provide URI’s to some supporting evidence. Expose the depth of a connection. Only met at a vouching party countersigning your credentials, or two decades of in person and online encounters and proof thereof are different in depth and quality, and may well impact how the Reverse Turing test turns out for others perusing your human.json file.

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Thanks ChatGPT!
Commenting is open on this website, and that means being engaged in a permanent asymmetric battle against spam. Asymmetric in the sense that like on any social media platform it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to automatically create and send out spam, falsehoods and hate speech in extremely large volumes, than it is for actual people to weed those out of their timelines and websites.
Most of incoming spam filtering is automated away these days, but always some and especially novel types are left for me te moderate myself, as the arms race continues.

A new entrant in the spam battle are AI generated spam comments that have clearly been fed the content of the actual blogpost that is being commented. Like other spam they stand out due to their blandness, what they link to and that the same things get submitted multiple times from different origins, but they are building on the content itself. I guess I should feel flattered.

It is also logical, as both spam and AI generated material are based on the exact same asymmetry. ‘Efficiency’ gains through AI generated text, are at best only that at the generation end of things (now see me generate oodles of text in seconds!), yet increases the effort needed at the receiving end to read it, see through the veil of plausibility, verify it and judge it inadequate.


Two examples of AI generated spam comments using the content of the actual blog posts (here a recent week notes posting, and one about donating money for ebooks rather than spending it at Amazon.) One commenter giving ‘undetectable AI’ as their name is a bit of a give-away though.

Any comments on this site already are subject to a Reverse Turing test, with all received material deemed generated until determined created by a person. Clearly this is no longer just a precaution resulting from tongue-in-cheek cleverness, but a must-have part of my toolkit for online interaction.