What is Human?

Designed in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects

AI-generated images from ChatGPT and DeepSeek
 

reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a Turing test to tell humans and bots apart. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out. By adding reCAPTCHA to a site, one can block automated software while welcoming users to enter with ease. 

 

This project juxtaposes the usual phrase used for reCAPTCHA, "I'm not a robot," with "I am a human" to direct users to identify as a compassionate human being with flesh and bones, rather than the passiveness or frustration of expressing that one is "not a robot". Instead of asking users to identify certain objects like fruits or buses, the image selection challenge encourages them to differentiate between AI-generated images and human-generated images. All images engage with the physicality of the human body, which robots or artificial intelligence have yet to obtain. Close observation is required to identify the AI images, which is a task that all should practice in a digital age where the line between truth and lie is blurred. AI images often appear too perfect and airbrushed, and it was interesting to note that it took a very long time for both ChatGPT and DeepSeek to come up with an image with the description "A young woman's face crying with tears running from her eyes," only to not come up with an image or the woman is simply not crying. The human experience of joy and pain is universal among humans and there is a story behind every image in our phones; they are connected with people and memories that AI cannot generate. 

Sources:
https://support.google.com/recaptcha/?hl=en#6080904