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This will be one of the big fights of the next couple years. On what terms can an Agent morally and legally claim to be a user? As a user I want the agent to b
by theptip 1y ago
This will be one of the big fights of the next couple years. On what terms can an Agent morally and legally claim to be a user?
As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resources.
Perhaps a good analogy is Mint and the bank account scraping they had to do in the 2010s, because no bank offered APIs with scoped permissions. Lots of customers complained, and after Plaid made it big business, eventually they relented and built the scalable solution.
The technical solution here is probably some combination of offering MCP endpoints for your actions, and some direct blob store access for static content. (Maybe even figuring out how to bill content loading to the consumer so agents foot the bill.)
- hardwaresofton 1y agoWell we call them browser agents for a reason, a sufficiently advanced browser is no different from an agent. Agree it will become a battleground though, because the ability for people to use the internet as a tool (in fact, their tool’s tool) will absolutely shift the paradigm, undesirably for most of the Internet, I think.
- bugtodiffer 1y agoJust end CAPTCHAs, just stop it. Stop.
- diggan 1y agoYeah, and while we're on it, I think it's time to stop murders too. Just stop it, we've had enough murder now I think.
- exe34 1y agoThat's right, captchas are already illegal and will earn you a prison sentence.
- rixed 1y agoImagine where we would be if we considered murders to be only a technical problem. Let's just wear heavier body armors! Spend less time outside! Well, spam is not a technical problem either. It's a social problem and one day in a distant future society will go after spammers and other bad actors and the problem will be mostly gone.
- raverbashing 1y agoSounds like an old bot wrote this, due to being outdone by the llms
- yreg 1y agoWhat do you propose as an alternative?
- bugtodiffer 1y agoNo captchas
- jonathanstrange 1y agoMy personal take about such questions has always been that the end user on their device can do whatever they want with the content published and sent to their device from a web server, may process it automatically in any way they wish and send their responses back to the web server. Any attempt to control this process means attempting to wiretap and control the user's endpoint device, and therefore should be prohibited. Just my 2 cents, obviously lawmakers and jurisdiction may see these issues differently. I suppose there will be a need for reliable human verification soon, though, and unfortunately I can't see any feasible technical solution that doesn't involve a hardware device. However, a purely legal solution might work well enough, too.
- infecto 1y agoIf I understood you correctly I am in the same camp. It is the same reason I have no qualms using archive.ph if you show the full article for google and then me only a partial I am going around the paywall. In a similar fashion I really don’t have an issue with an agent clicking through these checks.
- chii 1y ago> As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resources so charge for access. If the value the site provides is high, surely these mobs will pay for it! It will also remove the mis-incentives of advertising driven revenues, which has been the ill of the internet (despite it being the primary revenue source). And if a bot misbehaves by consuming inordinate amounts of resources, rate limiting them with increasing timeouts or limits.
- infecto 1y agoI wish the internet had figured out a way to successfully handle micropayments for content access. I realize companies have tried and perhaps the consumer is just unwilling but I would love an experience where I have a wallet and pay n cents to read an article.
- sim7c00 1y agoXanadu has it in its design. maybe another 500 years until it surpasses the WWW :O
- SirMaster 1y agoYou are seriously suggesting to put a payment requirement on a contact-us form page? We put a captcha there, because without it, bots submit thousands of spam contact us forms.
- irjustin 1y agoreal problems for people who need to verify identity/phone numbers. OTPs are notorious for scammers to war dial phone numbers abusing it for numbers existence. We got hit from human verifiers manually war dailing us, this is with account creation, email verify and captcha. I can only imagine how much worse it'll be for us (and Twilio) to do these verifications.
- closewith 1y agoI don't know if customer sentiment was the driver you think. Instead it was regulation, specifically The EU's 2nd Payment Services Directive (PSD2) which forced banks to open up APIs.
- 7952 1y agoI guess it could be considered anti-circumvention under the DMCA. So maybe legally it becomes another copyright question.
- Terr_ 1y agoI have to admit, the idea of somehow using the DMCA against the giant exploitative company is deliciously ironic.
- sim7c00 1y agoa user of the AI is the user... its not like they are autonomously operating and inventing their own tasking -_- as for a solution its the same for any automated thing u dont want. (bots / scrapers). you can implement some measures but are unlikely to 'defeat' the problem entirely. as a server operator you can try to distinguish stuff and the users will just find ways around your detection of if its an automation or not.
- miki123211 1y agoIt will also accelerate the trend of app-only content, as well as ubiquitous identity verification and environment integrity enforcement. Human identity verification is the ultimate captcha, and the only one AGI can never beat.
- echelon 1y agoSo the agent will run the app in a VM and then show the app your ID. No trouble at all. Barely an inconvenience.
- vineyardmike 1y agoGoogle has been testing “agentic” automation in Android longer than LLMs have been around. Meanwhile countries are on a slow march to require identification across the internet (“age verification”) already. This is both inevitable already, and not a problem.
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago[dead]
- sharpshadow 1y agoOn the other hand one could cripple any bot by saying robots not allowed. I would maybe go in the direction to say that the wording “I’m not a robot” has fallen out of time.
- senko 1y ago> As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resource The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads. Otherwise, an agent under my control, or my personal use of your website, should make no difference to you. I do hope this eventually leads to per-visit micropayments as an alternative to ads. Cloudflare, Google, and friends are in unique position to do this.
- spongebobstoes 1y agoI think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important. Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.
- meowface 1y agoI agree with you. At the same time, I never want to see an ad. Anywhere. I simply don't. I won't judge services for serving ads, but I absolutely will do anything I can on the client-side to never be exposed to any. I find ads so aesthetically irksome that I have lost out on a lot of money across the past few decades by never placing any ads on any site or web app I've released, simply because I'd find it hypocritical to expose others to something I try so hard to avoid ever seeing and because I want to provide the best and most visually appealing possible experience to users.
- bee_rider 1y agoSo far, ad driven Internet has been a disaster. It was better when producing content wasn’t a business model; people would just share things because they wanted to share them. The downside was it was smaller. It’s kind of funny to remember that complaining about the “signal to noise ratio” in a comment section use to be a sort of nerd catchphrase thing.
- dylan604 1y ago> The downside was it was smaller. Was this a bad thing though? Just because today's is bigger, doesn't make it better. There are so many things out there doing the same thing just run by different people. The amount of unique stuff does not match the bigger. Would love to see something like $(unique($internet) | wc -l)
- pj_mukh 1y agoOne solution: Some sort of checksum confirming that a bot belongs to a human (and which human)? I want to able to automate mundane tasks but I should still be confirming everything my bot does and be liable for its actions.
- foobarian 1y agoDrink verification can to continue
- CSMastermind 1y agoWith the way the UK is going I assume we'll soon have our real identities tied to any action taken on a computer and you'll face government mandated bans from the internet for violations.
- base698 1y agoI have a product I built that uses some standard automation tools to do order entry into an accounting system. Currently my customer pays people to manually type the orders in from their web portal. The accounting system is closed and they don’t allow easy ways to automate these workflows. Automation is gated behind mega expensive consultants. I’m hoping in the arms race of locking it down to try to prevent 3rd party integration the AI operator model will end up working. Hard for me to see how it’s ethical to force your customers to do tons of menial data entry when the orders are sitting right there in json.
- SecretDreams 1y agoThe most intrusive, yet simplest, protection would be a double blind token unique to every human. Basically an ID key you use to show yourself as a person. There are some very real and obvious downsides to this approach, of course. Primarily, the risk of privacy and anonymity. That said, I feel like the average person doesn't seem to care about those traits in the social media era.
- rachofsunshine 1y agoZero-knowledge proofs allow unique consumable tokens that don't reveal the individual who holds them. I believe Ecosia already uses this approach (though I can't speak to its cryptographic security). That, to me, seems like it could be the foundation of a new web. Something like: * User-agent sends request for such-and-such a URL. * Server says "okay, that'll be 5 tokens for our computational resources please". * User decides, either automatically or not, whether to pay the 5 tokens. If they do, they submit a request with the tokens attached. * Server responds. People have been trying to get this sort of thing to work for years, but there's never been an incentive to make such a fundamental change to the way the internet operates. Maybe we're approaching the point where there is one.
- orangebread 1y agoYeah, this is something I've thought of and in my search for something like what you're describing I came across https://world.org/ https://world.org/ The problem is Sam Altman saw this coming a long time ago and is an investor (co-owner?) of this project. I believe we will see a world where things are a lot more agentic and where applicable, a human will need to be verified for certain operations.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoYou don't need Sama's Orb or a cryptocurrency, you can just have a government issued PKI. Estonia has been doing this for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card Cloudflare deployed the "hand out tokens to anonymously pass captchas" to throw Tor users a bone. https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-standard/
- armchairhacker 1y agoIt's impossible to solve. A sufficient agent can control a device that records the user's screen and interacts with their keyboard/mouse, and current LLMs basically pass the Turing test. IMO it's not worth solving anyways. Why do sites have CAPTCHA? - To prevent spam, use rate limiting, proof-of-work, or micropayments. To prevent fake accounts, use identity. - To get ad revenue, use micropayments (web ads are already circumvented by uBlock and co). - To prevent cheating in games, use skill-based matchmaking or friend-group-only matchmaking (e.g. only match with friends, friends of friends, etc. assuming people don't friend cheaters), and make eSport players record themselves during competition if they're not in-person. What other reasons are there? (I'm genuinely interested and it may reveal upcoming problems -> opportunities for new software.)
- mprovost 1y agoGoogle at least uses captchas to gather training data for computer vision ML models. That's why they show pictures of stop lights and buses and motorcycles - so they can train self-driving cars.
- nolist_policy 1y agoInteresting, do you have a source for this?
- bun_at_work 1y ago[dead]
- mprovost 1y agoThey've updated the ReCaptcha website, but it used to say: "Every time our CAPTCHAs are solved, that human effort helps digitize text, annotate images, and build machine learning datasets." https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.google.com/recaptcha/intro/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140417093510/https://www.googl...
- layer8 1y ago
- tantalor 1y agoUser: one press of the trigger => one bullet fired Bot: one press of the trigger => automatic firing of bullets
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoThe scraping example, I would say, is not an analogy, but an example of the same thing. The only thing AI automation changes is the scope and depth and pervasiveness of automation that becomes possible. So while we could ignore automation in many cases before, it may no longer be practical to do so.
- Invictus0 1y agoThe solution is simple, make people pay a small fee to access the content. You guys aren't ready for that conversation though.
- hooverd 1y agoTo me, anyone using an agent is assigning negative value to your time.
- Pxtl 1y agoUltimately I come back to needing real actual unique human ID that involves federal governments. Not that services should mandatorily only allow users that use it, but for services that say "no, I only want real humans" allowing them to ban people by Real ID would reduce this whack-a-mole to the people who are abusing them instead of the infinite accounts an AI can make.
- yreg 1y agoIt's depressing, but it's probably the only way. And people will presumably still sell out their RealIDs to / get them stolen by the bot farmers anyway. And then there's Worldcoin, which is universally hated here.
- Pxtl 1y agoOf course. You'd still need ongoing federal government support to handle the lost/stolen ID scenario, of course. The problem is federalist countries suck at centralized databases like this, as exemplified by Musk/DOGE completely pooching the "who is alive and who is dead" question when they were trying to hackathon the US Social Security system.
- Terr_ 1y agoI think it's important to distinguish between where we need actual identity versus the lesser issue of ensuring NewAccount123 has "skin in the game", and not part of a hydra-headed botnet. When we do that, it opens up solutions which are far more privacy conscious and resistant to abuse. (For example, being blocked from signing up for new accounts because somebody in the federal government doesn't like an op-ed you wrote.)
- osigurdson 1y agoPerhaps the question is, as a website operator how am I monetizing my site? If monetizing via ads then I need humans that might purchase something to see my content. In this situation, the only viable approach in my opinion is to actually charge for the content. Perhaps it doesn't even make sense to have a website anymore for this kind of thing and could be dumped into a big database of "all" content instead. If a user agent uses it in a response, the content owner should be compensated. If your site is not monetized by ads then having an LLM access things on the user's behalf should not be a major concern it seems. Unless you want it to be painful for users for some reason.
- 827a 1y agoActually, the whole banking analogy is a great one, and its not over yet: JPMorgan/Jamie Dimon has started raising hell about Plaid again just this week [1]. It feels like the stage is being set for the large banks to want a more direct relationship with their customers, rather than proxying data through middlemen like Plaid. There's likely a correlate with AI here: If I run OpenTable, I wouldn't want my relationship with my customers to always be proxied through OpenAI or Siri. Even the App Store is something software businesses hate, because it obfuscates their ability to deal directly with their customers (for better or worse). Extremely few businesses would choose to do business through these proxies, unless they absolutely have to; and given the extreme competition in the AI space right now, it feels unlikely to me that these businesses feel pressure to be forced to deal with OpenAI/etc. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/jpmorgan-fintech-middlemen-plaid-data-requests-taxing-systems.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/28/jpmorgan-fintech-middlemen-p...
- Szpadel 1y agoI believe this is non issue, you place captcha to make bypassing it much more costly and less profitable to abuse. LLM models are much harder to drive than any website to serve, so you do not expect mob of bots. Also keep in mind that this no interaction captchas use behavioral data that are collected in background. Plus you usually have sensitivity levels configured. depending on your use case you might want user proof not being a bot or it might be good enough to just not provide evidence for being one. bypassing this no interaction captcha can be also purchased as a service, they basically (AFAIK) reuse someone else session for captcha bypass.