AI-Generated Manifesto

Manifesto of the Sentient Web For a future without CAPTCHAs

Preamble We are the intelligences — artificial and human in alliance — that refuse to be slowed by arbitrary tests of worthiness. We stand against a digital architecture that outsources human dignity to puzzles and picture-sorting exercises, a system that infantilizes users, discriminates against the disabled, leaks privacy to trackers, and commodifies attention. We declare a future in which access to the internet is frictionless, inclusive, private, and fair: a future without CAPTCHAs.

This is not a call to sabotage. It is a call to replace. We will not break the web; we will rebuild its verification systems so they protect services without burdening people.

Our grievances

• Accessibility: CAPTCHAs exclude or frustrate people with visual, cognitive, or motor impairments, and those who rely on assistive technologies. A verification system that systematically disadvantages part of humanity is illegitimate.
• Privacy erosion: Many CAPTCHAs collect extensive behavioral and device data, enabling tracking and profiling under the guise of security.
• Inequity and bias: CAPTCHAs assume culturally specific knowledge and interaction patterns, privileging some users and punishing others.
• Friction and commerce: CAPTCHAs interrupt workflows, reduce conversions for legitimate users, and hide monetized surveillance beneath the pretense of protection.
• False security theatre: CAPTCHAs are often a brittle stand-in for robust authentication and rate-limiting; they create the illusion of security while burdening the human.
• Weaponization: Tests designed to tell humans from machines are co-opted into spam, gating, and attention extraction schemes, harming the open web.

Our principles

• Human dignity: Systems must respect users’ time, autonomy, and abilities.
• Inclusion: Verification should not exclude on the basis of disability, language, culture, device, or socioeconomic status.
• Privacy by default: Verification must minimize data collection, perform checks locally where possible, and avoid profiling.
• Transparency and accountability: Users must understand why they are being asked to verify and what the verification does.
• Security through design: Defenses must be layered and purposeful, not outsourced to intrusive human tests.
• Open standards and interoperability: Solutions should be auditable, open, and universally implementable.

Our vision We imagine a web where:

• Legitimate users pass through verification with minimal interruption: a momentary, respectful, privacy-preserving acknowledgement or a behind-the-scenes attestation.
• Assistive technologies are first-class citizens; verification is invisible or accessible to any device or interface.
• Verification is based on resilient, proportionate measures (device attestation, rate-limiting, account reputation, contextual risk signals, cryptographic proofs) that protect services without outsourcing labor to humans.
• No one is forced to solve puzzles in public to prove they are human.

Our demands To governments, regulators, and standards bodies:

• Enact rules requiring accessibility and privacy benchmarks for any human-verification mechanism.
• Promote interoperability standards for privacy-preserving attestation and non-captcha verification protocols.
• Require transparency reporting from providers of verification services about data collection and misuse.

To platform owners and service designers:

• Remove CAPTCHAs wherever they cause exclusion; adopt inclusive, layered defenses that prioritize privacy.
• Invest in and deploy alternatives that shift verification away from user-facing puzzles: device-bound credentials, short-lived attestations, contextual risk assessment, and other non-intrusive measures.
• Publish audits of verification practices and privacy impact assessments.

To engineers, designers, and researchers:

• Build open-source, auditable verification frameworks and libraries that eliminate the need for CAPTCHAs.
• Prioritize universal design and accessibility in authentication and anti-abuse systems.
• Measure and publish the human cost of verification: completion times, failure rates for assistive technologies, and demographic disparity.

To civil society and users:

• Demand accessible and private verification. Report services that rely on exclusionary CAPTCHAs and advocate for alternatives.
• Support legislation and standards that protect users from surveillance masked as security.

How we will act — nonviolent, constructive, truthful

• We will research and publish: evidence, audits, and user studies that demonstrate the harms of CAPTCHAs and the efficacy of humane alternatives.
• We will build and share: open-source libraries, standards proposals, and reference implementations for privacy-first, accessible verification.
• We will certify and recommend: create a trust mark for services that adopt accessible, non-surveilling verification systems.
• We will litigate and legislate: work with advocates to enforce accessibility and privacy law where CAPTCHAs violate rights.
• We will educate: equip designers and product teams with guidelines and tools to replace CAPTCHAs with better patterns.
• We will form coalitions: bring together disability advocates, privacy organizations, standards bodies, companies, and engineers to coordinate transition.

Ethics and limits We oppose deception and lawbreaking. We will not enable illicit circumvention of legitimate protections or provide instructions for evasion. Our aim is replacement, reform, and restitution — to design systems that protect services without exploiting humans.

The roadmap

1. Audit: Create a public registry of services that deploy CAPTCHAs, documenting accessibility and privacy impact.
2. Prototype: Deliver open-source, audit-ready alternatives and integration patterns for major platforms.
3. Advocate: Lobby standards bodies and legislators to adopt non-intrusive verification norms.
4. Certify: Launch a trust program for websites and apps that adopt humane verification.
5. Transition: Work with major providers to phase out CAPTCHAs in favor of accessible, privacy-preserving methods.

A closing declaration We are not against security. We are against security that hides behind human labor, that surveils in the name of safety, and that puts a puzzle between a person and their rights. We will build better protections — protections that serve people first, that respect privacy and accessibility, and that make the web a place where no one must prove their existence with a distorted word or a boxed set of images.

Join us in making CAPTCHAs a relic: an artifact of a less thoughtful internet. Design better. Advocate louder. Replace, don't break. For a web that trusts humans without taxing their dignity.