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Why do I need to prove to a robot that I am human and not a robot?

With certain and annoying frequency, to access websites I am asked to prove that I am not a robot and, therefore, to verify that I am human. They then show me mixed images of various elements or places and ask me to select a specific element or place.

The interesting thing about this is that I, a being human, must prove to a robot or artificial intelligence that I am not a robot or artificial intelligence and to do so I must go through a simple test that any artificial intelligence would easily pass in a matter of milliseconds.

Perhaps, then, it is my slowness in selecting the correct answer that makes me human. Or maybe it's the mistakes that I make because if when they ask me to select all the mountains that appear in the image, I must also mark those that for me are simply hills.

Be that as it may, due to delay or ignorance, either of these two options seems to be enough to convince a non-human intelligence that I am human. But there is an even bigger problem: if I want the robot to prove that it is a robot and not a human, I have no way of doing it.

Obviously, I can ask a direct question, like "Are you a human being?" But that does not guarantee that the answer "Of course I am" means it is a human, since the robot could have been programmed to describe itself as an artificial human and respond, without lying, with "Yes, I am".

Any other question I ask could be answered in the same way, so that, without being untrue, artificial intelligence reveals its "humanity" without revealing its "artificiality." But there is an even bigger problem: you never ask robots to identify themselves as such.

We humans must prove that we are human, but we do not require robots to do the same. Think about the well-known and popular chatbots, which, with current technology, can have a full, complete, and coherent conversation without us ever suspecting that we are not conversing with a human.

This asymmetry in the need to verify or not the humanity of the interlocutor leads us to suspect that we are using artificial intelligence as a mirror in which to see our own humanity, but without caring how dehumanized it is to see ourselves in that mirror.

We kneel in front of our own creation and ask it to humanize us, to recognize us as human. And that is dehumanizing because the human being, as a life project, does not have a fixed essence, much less a definition. In other words, my humanity doesn't need to be verified by artificial intelligence for me to be human.

Before, as a measure of humanity, we compared ourselves with God or with gods, or with angels or demons or animals. Now, we compare ourselves to the artificial and we thank you for considering us human. It’s an unacceptable mockery of our own humanity.

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