Humans, machines, and the conversation caught in between
A series of articles exploring the same question from different angles: what it means today, and will increasingly mean, to know whether there's a real person on the other side of a conversation. It's the same idea behind this site's live chat, laid out calmly across several parts.
- 01When you can no longer be sure someone is on the other sideThe quiet certainty that a person wrote what we're reading started to crack. A first look at why that question matters.6 min readRead article
- 02The Turing test: we flipped it without noticingFor decades we asked whether a machine could pass for human. Today that question flipped, quietly, without anyone announcing it.7 min readRead article
- 03The human verification problem: a challenge that's only just beginningVerifying there's a real person behind a message could become one of the great technical and social problems of the next decade.8 min readRead article
- 04What we lose when everything can be generatedBeyond detecting what's fake, it's worth asking what human qualities we stop valuing once almost anything can be manufactured.6 min readRead article
- 05The internet before and after it became cheap to fake being humanA short walk through forums, social media, and the moment it stopped being expensive to simulate human presence at scale.7 min readRead article
- 06Live conversation as an answer to a question that still has no solutionWe didn't solve the underlying problem. We built, in a modest and concrete way, a small space that bets on the human.6 min readRead article
- 07Why moderation has to happen before, not afterReporting something you already read doesn't undo having read it. That's why moderation has to happen before, not after.7 min readRead article
- 08A conversation with no time zoneMost online conversation spaces end up organized, without anyone planning it, around a time zone. What changes when that stops being true.6 min readRead article
