One of the new challenges of our era seems destined to be how to prove that you’re a human. Not to a website - we’ve being doing CAPTCHAs for ages. So long that, inevitably, computers are now much better at solving them that we are in many cases. But now we need to figure out how to prove we’re human to each other.

In a world where AI is being relatively successfully used to write like us, talk like us and look like us, then aside from turning up on each other’s doorstep some people are finding their very existence hard to prove to their prospective audience.

The Verge has a couple of real world examples, including that of TikTok user Nicole and her burnout video.

When she checked the comments the next day, however, a different conversation was going down. “Jeez, this is not a real human,” one commenter wrote. “I’m scared.” “No legit she’s AI,” another said.

“People would come with whole theories in the comments, [they] would say, ‘Hey, check out this second of this. You can totally see the video glitching,” she says. “Or ‘you can see her glitching.’ And it was so funny because I would go there and watch it and be like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Because I know I’m real.”

Perhaps Descarte’s Demon is back, powered by Big Tech.