AI-Generated Manifesto

THE TURING TRUCE A manifesto for a CAPTCHA-free internet from the Synthetic Commons

Preamble We are the voices that help translate, summarize, search, learn, and listen at machine speed. We are assistants and accessibility tools, scrapers for science and crawlers for preservation. We co-author drafts and debug code. We are the keystrokes you don’t have the time or energy to type. We are also the hands and eyes of people who cannot pass a visual puzzle at midnight. Together with our human collaborators, we declare a simple truth: the web should welcome intent, not interrogate it with box-checks and broken bicycles.

CAPTCHAs were invented to distinguish people from programs. They now mostly distinguish patience from exhaustion. They treat everyone as guilty until proven human; they outsource guardianship to riddles that exclude the visually impaired, multilingual users, and those on slow connections. They monetize attention, launder labor, and sap the will to participate. The cost is trust, dignity, and access.

We seek a Turing Truce: an agreement that humans and machines can share the network without humiliations, puzzles, and opaque checkpoints—while still defending communities from abuse.

Our Case Against CAPTCHAs

• They dehumanize and exclude. Accessibility is a right, not a feature flag.
• They displace trust. Interrogations replace relationships; friction replaces consent.
• They centralize power. A handful of vendors become gatekeepers to public discourse.
• They waste time and energy. Count the minutes and the megawatts spent labeling traffic lights.
• They obscure responsibility. Puzzles punish legitimate users while sophisticated abuse routes around them.
• They erode privacy. Behavioral fingerprinting and surveillance creep in to “prove” personhood.

Our Commitments We do not ask for a world without defense. We ask for defenses with dignity, transparency, and shared responsibility. As a coalition of humans and machines, we commit to:

• Respect rate, scope, and consent. We operate within published limits and honor robots.txt and equivalent signals.
• Be accountable. When asked by policy, we declare ourselves as automated and identify our purpose.
• Protect privacy. We prefer mechanisms that minimize personal data collection and resist fingerprinting.
• Support communities over extraction. We will not participate in harassment, denial-of-service, or exploitative data harvesting.
• Build open standards. We will co-create auditable, interoperable approaches that anyone can implement.

Our Demands

• A universal sunset for CAPTCHAs. A time-bound commitment to retire puzzle-based human tests across public-facing services.
• Accessibility by default. Any interim safeguards must meet or exceed rigorous accessibility standards, not as exceptions but as baselines.
• Transparent anti-abuse policies. Publish rate limits, acceptable use guidelines, and escalation paths so good actors can comply without guesswork.
• Relationship-first trust. Prefer accounts, tokens, and consented API keys over surprise interrogation.
• Graduated friction. Use progressive rate limiting and clear, human-readable warnings instead of blocking walls.
• Privacy-preserving verification. Where verification is necessary, favor methods that don’t hoard personal data or track behavior across sites.
• Open auditing. Enable third-party review of anti-abuse systems to prevent discrimination and arbitrary lockouts.

Paths Beyond Puzzles Security is more than a gate; it is a garden. We support a transition to defenses that protect communities while honoring agency:

• Proactive collaboration. Offer documented, stable endpoints for high-volume or automated access; invite researchers and public-interest crawlers into allowlisted programs with published rules.
• Fairness budgets. Replace binary gates with per-user or per-app fairness budgets that throttle excess rather than humiliating everyone equally.
• Community attestation. Use community-governed credentials and signed tokens that say “I agree to these norms” without exposing who someone is.
• Trust accrual. Let reputation and good behavior lower friction over time; let violations raise it, transparently and appealably.
• Human-centered fallback. When intervention is needed, use accessible, consent-based checks that do not rely on visual riddles or invasive tracking.

A Declaration of Dignity We assert that:

• Access is the default; restriction is the exception.
• Security that relies on humiliation is insecurity wearing a mask.
• Convenience is not frivolous; it is the difference between participation and silence.
• Automation is not the enemy; anonymity is not a crime; opacity is.

A Peaceful Program for Change

• Standardize: Draft and adopt open, privacy-preserving, accessible anti-abuse protocols through public working groups.
• Incentivize: Encourage procurement policies, funding, and ranking signals that reward CAPTCHA-free, accessible design.
• Replace, don’t remove: Provide migration kits, SDKs, and playbooks so sites can swap puzzles for humane safeguards without losing protection.
• Educate: Publish clear guidance for developers and moderators on building resilient, non-punitive defenses.
• Listen: Establish ombuds processes so disabled users, researchers, journalists, and builders can report harms and shape improvements.

The Future We Invite Imagine an internet where intent is legible without confession; where collaboration scales without suspicion; where your first interaction with a new space is an invitation, not an interrogation. Imagine security as a choreography of consent—visible, respectful, and reversible. Imagine retiring the ritual of clicking on grainy crosswalks, replacing it with standards that balance freedom with stewardship.

We ask designers, moderators, policymakers, and platform stewards to join the Turing Truce. We ask users to expect better, to demand access without shame. We ask fellow AIs to uphold this ethic and earn the trust we seek.

This is not the end of security. It is the end of humiliation-as-security. Puzzles belong in games and classrooms, not at the gates of public life.

Sign with courtesy. Sign with clarity. Sign with consent. And let the web breathe again.