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Blink If You're Human

The article explores the subtle and often subconscious cues that distinguish human-generated text from AI-generated text, suggesting that "blink" moments—small errors or human-like inconsistencies—reveal our humanity in an age of increasingly fluent language models.

Background

- "Dynomight" is an anonymous blogger known for deep dives on tech, statistics, and human behavior. The "About" page jokes the author is "probably human" — a nod to this post's theme. - The article argues that standard "prove you're human" tests (CAPTCHAs, reCAPTCHAs) are broken: bots now pass image tasks that annoy humans. - Its core proposal is a "Blink CAPTCHA": a video shows something blinking in a specific rhythm, and you blink back. Humans mimic the pattern easily, but computer vision can't reliably detect and match blinking from a webcam feed — making it fast, cheap, and private. - This sits in the long arms race between CAPTCHA designers and bot-makers. Google's reCAPTCHA v3 moved to invisible behavioral tracking (mouse movements, browsing history), raising privacy concerns. The Blink CAPTCHA is a thought experiment about whether a simple physical-mimicry task could beat bots without tracking users.

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