Are You a Human?

From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.